


flowers blooming from your hope

by the_ocean_weekender



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1974), The Great Gatsby (2013)
Genre: 1920s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/F, F/M, Feminist Themes, Friendship, Gay Nick Carraway, Gen, Hanahaki Disease, Jay Gatsby Lives, Lesbian Jordan Baker, M/M, Misunderstandings, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Not Beta Read, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, Pining, Romance, Slow Burn, to write like f scott fitzgerald you just need to use adjectives as verbs, we do not bash female characters in this house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-06-02 03:47:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19433290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_ocean_weekender/pseuds/the_ocean_weekender
Summary: When Daisy doesn't kill Myrtle, Nick takes Gatsby home and sleeps with him as a distraction. And keeps sleeping with him. Everybody lives and it would be fine, if Nick doesn't begin to develop Hanahaki disease because of his love for Gatsby and refuses to tell him he loves him, convinced he's just a place-holder for his cousin.Update 6:59am 9.8.19: chapter four is done and just needs to be typed upUpdate : 21:03pm 10.8.19: chapter four is typed and just needs to be proofread





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> *waves* so this fic has been rattling around my brain for four (ish?) months and is heavily based upon two tumblr posts (linked below) and it has been a bitch to write. the first chapter has a sex scene in it, in case anyone wants to avoid that, and this story is going to be natsby-focused but we support female characters in this house
> 
> https://ask-the-great-gatsby.tumblr.com/post/183175479566/hanahaki-au-natsby-nick-develops-his-crush-on  
> https://byjove-cannibalcove.tumblr.com/post/182435868935/thinking-about-the-hanahaki-disease-its-so

In his younger and more vulnerable years, an aged aunt had once scoffed at him for naivety even as he attempted to portray himself as the exact opposite. Though it certainly stung in the moment, Time proved her right, as it often did wise relatives: Nick Carraway did not know what men could do to each other.

Soon having learnt, necessity taught him how to hide and it was not a lesson he ever forgot.

***

There had been an accident outside Wilson’s garage: a near-crash, car and woman finally emerging from the dust into the boiling afternoon unharmed but shaken, anxious with the possibility that Daisy Buchanan did _not_ press the brake in time. A near thing, a very near thing indeed- titters of concern had just begun to break out when the proprietor of the garage came running out chasing after his wife, with her lover arriving on the scene soon after. Wilson was pale, grey and sweating, screaming vulgarities that Myrtle was glad to return and even gladder to use to draw Tom into the matter. When the sorry affair came to light, with all parties present now in the know and sadly involved, they caused a scene of such proportion one neighbour phoned for the police.

Nick was aware of none of this up until the point a blue-clad office whose uniform stuck to his back in the sweltering heat rapped his knuckles on the window of Tom’s car and startled the life out of him. Following on from that, the conversation went down-hill- he was hardly in any state to remember his name and address, let alone explain to the upstanding officer of the law what he knew of the situation. In fact, the longer he sat there with Jordan’s arm looped into his and burning like a brand, the less sure he became of anything, falling over his words until the man gave him up for a lost cause.

Jordan stood and stepped over him to exit the little blue coupe and he began to come back to himself as the splinters of the commotion unwound in his brain, his eyes drawn to the perfect straight black cut of her hair across her cheek. “I’m going to see what’s happened,” she declared coolly. The summer air was claustrophobic but he still felt cold when she left to wind through the crowd. Someone asked who had called the police and someone else answered in the affirmative- “I did!”- And the shouting began again, drowning out the chirpings of the cicadas floating in the scrubbed bushes either side of the road. He got the distinct feeling that Jordan was angry with him; only at the same moment he caught the glint of Gatsby’s golden hair in the lamp glow and fell out of the car towards the sun.

So focused was his intensity, he scarcely noticed the hot press of the crowd that had gathered until he spilled from it at Gatsby’s side; the volume was not so loud in the epicentre of the storm but the insults were still being thrown. Jordan, Nick spotted, had taken up a position similar to his at Daisy’s elbow, though her face had not slipped out from under that haughty mask and she looked right down her straight nose at Tom. Myrtle and Wilson were still bombarding one another with all the resentment a twelve year marriage could bring and had been absorbed into the first and second rows of the bystanders- mostly ignored- and Tom was blustering his excuses, eyes darting about everywhere as he saw everyone as a linebacker for the opposing team. Disgusted, Nick looked to the one man he willingly stood beside and wondered if the expression on his face meant anything. His attentions were all on Daisy- that was a given- but the look on his face now he observed the scene with the prior knowledge of how unyielding precious metal could be was completely unreadable. The policeman was trying to talk to Myrtle and Wilson and take down people’s names and addresses at the same time. Daisy spoke rarely but whenever she did the words were cold- she would not like being the centre of attention, Nick knew, having all of these starving vultures pecking over her marriage and tearing off the pearls of her necklace one by one- and over time she began to curl in on herself, head lowering and eyes misting over. Tom undoubtedly saw and pressed his advantage, looking to make one last stand in is football game and he felt Gatsby tense up beside him.

Nick caught his elbow, “Don’t go over.”

“What?” he’d never seen that titan’s face so damned and even in disarray the man was perfect.

 _She’s already rejected you, you fool!_ He longed to say it and instead he closed his eyes, but his tongue until he tasted blood and then replied, “Don’t go over, Jay.”

How long the spectacle had been taking place was a mystery- the only idea of time passing was the crowd pressing closer, closer, until they were all standing together with another policeman finally arrived finding it impossible to make his way to them. When Tom paused for breath long enough and they stood under a blanket of the Wilson’s domestic blue streak, Nick cut in: “I don’t think we should really continue this here.”

Everyone looked shocked he was talking, as if they had forgotten he was not just a bystander along with the rest of them. With how his clothes were pressed up against his skin, he might have been. Any other words he may have spoken died on his tongue as Tom turned to look at him with burning pale eyes. Jordan may have favoured him the same disgust, but her mask was still as unbroken as expensive porcelain. Daisy’s shoulders curled further around her lowered head; a dying birthday candle in a circle of dark clothes, the hem of her dress fluttering the barest inch above the dust.

Tom pressed on, standing straight with the rage and force of a team of college football players in a narrow corridor. “Yes for once you’re right, Nick. Daisy?” He turned that imperious gale to her and for once in his life Nick pitied his cousin.

“What do you want to do?” asked Jordan softly- never before had she sounded warm like a gentle breeze on a summer’s day, the cynical woman who cheated at golf.

Trembling, Daisy looked only at her, then back at the ground again, “Please may I just go home?”

Tom stepped forward, transformed into a Rottweiler, “Well then-“

“No!” she cried, voice high and fragile and struggling to rise as she looked at the ground. “Not you.”

Gatsby squared his shoulders and stepped forward, face full of triumph, “I’ll take her-“

“No,” Daisy shook her head and sobbed once, looking terrified and terribly confused. “I don’t want you.”

It was the nail in the coffin. A slim, bronze arm took her under its protections with the same determination in which it swung a golf club. “I will take you,” declared Jordan, tone brooking no arguments- not even from Tom- and she whisked Daisy away to the little blue coupe without a glance for anyone else, hurrying the golden girl away before she could wilt in the dust and be trampled underfoot.

Taking hold of Gatsby’s elbow, Nick pulled him through the crowd to the yellow car, now ignored as everyone in the valley looked at the couple whose argument had not faltered since it started.

“Come on,” he ordered, tugging Gatsby with him and climbing into the driver’s seat- whatever other flaws he may have possessed, Nick Carraway was at least the most careful driver of anyone he knew. Gatsby did not move, did not even break his vigil from the crowd and the blue automobile disappearing into the distance. “Jay? Come on, Jay, we’ll get you home.”

“She’ll be alright tomorrow,” he said as if he hadn’t heard a word Nick said. “But I ought to go over in case he tries to bother her about any of this unpleasantness. He might try some brutality.”

It was all Nick could do not to scream. Or cry. “He won’t touch her. He’s not thinking about her.”

“I don’t trust him, old sport.”

“You can’t wait outside the house all night- you’ll be arrested. Come home and get some sleep.”

He shook his head. “I need to look after her, old sport.” He put his hands in his coat pockets, straining his eyes to keep up his sacred vigil. Nick did not have the heart to tell him that he was watching over nothing. Part of him was tempted to leave him there with Tom and drive after Jordan and Daisy and let the men sort it out. He put his head in his hands, suddenly tired, feeling as if he was a green youth about to graduate college again and not liking it at all, his place in the world thrown into turmoil.

When he looked up, he met the eyes of Dr T J Eckleburg over the heads of the thronging crowd. “Get in the car, Jay, I’m not giving you a choice.”

To his immense surprise, he did.

They circled around the crowd- carefully, in fits and starts with a careful driver at the wheel- and spotted Tom as they drove off, his eyes clearly drawn to the ostentatious paintwork, before he disappeared into the crowd for perhaps the first time in his life. Forever after, Nick was unsure where Tom went and was unwilling to ask; part of him was ashamed to admit it but he hoped Wilson would take him outside for five minutes and leave him in a sorrier state than when he found him. However reports all said he arrived back at the Buchanan Mansion in the early hours of the morning with not a hair out of place. More likely was that Tom was a bar of steel and bent all those gathered to his will. Nick gladly fled and left it all behind as he drove him and Gatsby past Dr T J Eckleburg and out into the stars.

***

It was late when they began driving and even later when they arrived home- Gatsby’s home, Nick realised with a pang of ineffable feeling. He had yet to go home and his feet felt heavier as he realised how much of the night was left to see.

The World’s Fair blazing sodium was long departed; in its place lay an abandoned wasteland prowling the shadows, making its own animals because the wildlife dared not tiptoe even an inch over the thresholds. Ceilings grew higher in the navy shroud of a dying day and the increase of air in the room made it harder to breath. Gatsby lead listlessly and Nick followed, watching as the Titanic sank and remembering the news articles that had come out after the survivors reached their shores that the ship had been on fire all along. They explored the empty grand mansion and pushed aside Tsar-esque furniture, stroked smooth cushions and kept ever an eye out for a stray cigarette. All those people who had pilgrimaged and bargained and wheedled and scoffed and snorted and traipsed even in the short time of the one summer Nick had been witness to, and not one of them had left behind a half-full packet of cigarettes. Nick opened a door, found it not to be a room but an Aladdin’s wardrobe and joked upon shutting it that at least he knew he had hired a competent staff, good at cleaning. And Gatsby replied in an affirmative ‘old sport’ but the mood did not lighten and the sun did not break.

When he tumbled onto the keys of a never-played piano and created a haunting splash, the interruption shocked Gatsby from listlessness back to pity-taking and he led them out onto a discreet balcony to sit on the way the night air had turned against the hot season.

In his pocket, Nick suddenly realised he had a new pack of _Lucky Strikes_ and handed one over to his neighbour with no fanfare; Gatsby lit their cigarettes from the same match and if Nick thought, dipping his head closer to get to the flame, that the man ought to smell of the labour of the day or his hand shake from all that he had gone through, he kept the thought to himself for Gatsby was still the marble Adonis of his own creation. No matter how long they continued sitting there, the sky did not get any lighter. The story of James Gatz was a long one, and the sky was still dark by the time the past had caught up to the present. Even the Sound had gone to sleep- it was just him, Gatsby, and the curtains fluttering like dust in the wake of his dreams.

The purple bruising had not surrendered even when Gatsby finally stood, face blank as the steel of a gun and stretched a hand to Nick, cigarette vanished.

“Let’s go inside, old sport.” His voice was steady and his eyes darted around out of reach, “I think it might rain.”

It was not going to rain, Nick knew, but he took the hand anyway. They closed the doors with a bang that startled them both and slipped down long, endless hallways with their gilt blackened into obscurity until they came to another room, huge for all the things not in it. _Gatsby’s bedroom_ he realised, with a marked absence of anything resembling the abortive fears a man should feel on a night such as this. The place in the mansion which had no concept of any separation of Gatz and Gatsby, where its inhabitant simply lived and breathed and became. At first Nick thought that the room had green-paned windows, until he realised he had been in this room before and it didn’t, but it had the best view of the green light in the whole world.

He tried to make his excuses and leave- he was too poor and too old to view an enchanted object as anything but unholy, too unimaginative to ask any sort of hope or fortune to bless his dreams, too much himself to have dreams. Only Gatsby looked over at him in the light of the night that was sure to go on forever and murmured, “Stay, old sport, please.” Nick stayed. He stayed all night and it was a long night.

What did a man do when his hope surpassed his dreams? Perhaps he died a little inside.

Gatsby took up his eternal vigil, hand on the cool glass and looking at his green light, looking out for Daisy; and to his left Nick stood, looking at Gatsby, thinking upon him as he thought of nothing but Daisy. And the night went on.

Gatsby was great, Nick knew. Greater for the fact that he made himself and then in his golden momentum made the world. His voice wasn’t made of money but the thrill and potentials of life and hope that went beyond even wealth. _I am in love with him_ , Nick realised rather absently. The thought grew like an oncoming train- it had been coming on for quite some time and now left him quite breathless. Ever since the night that they had first met there was room for nothing but Gatsby; feeling his legs buckle, he was immensely grateful that he was stood away from his dream, in the golden shadows with darkness over his face so that his revelation remained his own intimacy. Breathing through the infinity, he exhaled with the Sound and remained nameless- there was only the night and the green glow and Gatsby and that was enough for him.

It was going to have to be- he kept hoping maybe Gatsby would turn to look at him, acknowledge him somehow and just put to rest the ideas stirring on the tide within that came in and out in time with his heartbeat until he thought the Sound would wash even the huge mansion away. He didn’t look. He didn’t look at him once the whole night when something between them may have been possible until, finally, when it was irrevocably and undeniably a strand of yellow daylight that was entering the room and marring that ghastly green light, Gatsby could no longer fool his own hopes and turned to him, miserable and alone. "Did she ever love me, old sport?”

Nick wanted to tell him no- it was possibly the only way to halt this fool’s errand forever; that penchant for hope would rise again and bear him through to the other side, more alive and more Gatsby than ever before, except Nick could not do that to him and he would have been a liar. The truth was simply too complex for such a man- love was not always enough.

“Yes,” he told him eventually, for after all Nick was the most honest person Nick knew. “Yes, Jay, she did love you. It’s just...” how could you tell a man love was not enough when love had driven him to all _this_? He stumbled over his words, “Just- it- with Tom there, and she has a daughter to think about now. It’s not just as simple as upping and leaving him. Things... time changes things and you can’t repeat the past.”

His little murmur ‘of course you can’ was so forlorn Nick had to act and thus did so without thinking. It was quite possibly the best or worst decision he had ever made. Leaning forward, hoping to appear as confident as the stars as by no stretch of any imagination did he feels so, he kissed him on the mouth. His lips were everything Nick had dreamed of, even before he had begun to dream. He kissed him and when he felt nothing back, retreated, anxieties looming up again akin to some great beast unfolding out of the depths, water cascading off its back; this was a sin on par to treason, murder, he was foul and would never look upon his rare smile- “Again.”

Nick blinked. “W- what?”

His face hardened, though not in the way that Nick could believe he killed a man although not dissimilar. “Again, Nick, damn you” and he surged forward and the sea crashed over him.

They tumbled back onto the huge bed in a flurry; a race to get one another naked before the day broke, competing with the sun as it slid up over the floor to the bed spread, one corner of the crisp white silk dangling on the mahogany linoleum flooring. Then Nick was naked and then Gatsby had his trousers off and his jacket off and his shirt was undone. One of them bit the other and deep purple bruises began to bloom in bouquets all over their skin- Gatsby inched into him with little preparation as the room turned gold with dawn, Nick gasped and wheezed until he fell onto his arms and they were chest to chest, too hot and their toes still cold. Hungry, starving kisses missed mouths and Gatsby bit his shoulder and cried out Daisy’s name over and over. Tension was building in Nick like it hadn’t since his first illicit, clandestine fumble during his college years, mounting the cliff edge and ready to leap.

“Daisy,” Gatsby begged, moaned, gasped, Nick’s cheeks wet from his tears. “Daisy, Daisy Daisy Daisy Daisy.”

Nick wanted to tell him that his cousin was not a prayer, did not want to think of his cousin at a time like this, worried if he thought only of Gatsby he’d come too soon and embarrass himself; longed to say a stranger’s name as revenge or saving face over some other emotion, but he never caught Mr McKee’s first name and he didn't want to be thinking of Mr McKee at a time like this either, wanted some dream of his own who would inspire him to great lengths and drive him to madness- he had no one like that but Gatsby, only Gatsby- Gatsby- Gatsby and the orgasm left him cold with want. In one fluid exhale of motion Gatsby slid out and off, curling against his die in the mess of the bed sheets and summer air, daylight bleaching the window to a hot-white rectangle.

“That was very nice, old sport.”

Damning praise, perhaps, yet the words beat a pulse into Nick’s brain and he rolled over, unable to tell if his new position left him looking at the other man more and less, head spinning as the night caught up with him. At a loss of what else he might say, he stuttered: “I didn't know you were- um-“

“Men. Women.” He shrugged coldly. “There’s only Daisy.”

Nick closed his eyes, immune to the blow but hurting anyway and very tired- he had never stayed up so late before. “You should forget about her, Jay- they’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth more than the whole damn bunch put together.”

Gatsby laughed, a golden laugh rich with holiness and offered a cigarette under his nose which Nick took, glad of something to do with his mouth, “So are you, Nick.”

 _Nick, he called me Nick_. His thoughts turned to a decade before, when they were both young and in love with people who would leave them in the end. In his more vulnerable years it had been dark shining hair immaculately styled, and _Bryl Creem_ scenting his shirt collars and long, thin fingers that touched parts of his body Nick had never before known existed. _He called me Daisy_.

The mattress shifted and an oven of hot air blew over his skin as Gatsby moved and pulled up the sheets, settling down mussed against his pillows like a king at the end of a very long day. “Stay a while, old sport- longer, if you want. I don’t mind.”

The cigarette gave him something to do with his hands other than sit on them resisting the urge to see how soft hair of spun gold was, “I ought to get going- I’ll miss my train.”

It wasn’t a lie that he’d go into the city, although he wouldn’t be worth a stroke of work or luck, but at least none of the windows looked onto Gatsby’s mansion. A low, low, languid sound drew to a natural end and he forced himself out of bed and began dressing, cursing the rumpled state of his shirt and the newly-discovered need to dash home and change, especially compared to the man who look debauchery look elegant and who, when he rose properly, would be righting himself with the toilette set of pure dull gold that Nick could see on the dresser. “Right,” he pulled at his clothes, trying to make his skin fit his skeleton and so terribly, horrendously awkward he could scarcely keep from fidgeting. “I’ll, um, I’ll call you?”

The infamous smile melted his face, golden with a summer morning, focusing its power upon Nick’s quivering form and allowing him one brief moment of a miracle that perhaps he found the man’s nervousness endearing. “Call me, old sport,” he agreed and just as Nick stammered his umpteenth excuse and nicety and turned for the door trying to remember the way to the front door, a hand darted like a silver fish in the ocean to grab his tie and pull him neck-first onto the bed with an undignified sort of squawk that Gatsby cut short with a kiss.

When it ended, he winked, “Talk to you later, old sport.”

Nick stumbled on an affirmative and left, realising only two corridors away that he’d gone left out of the bedroom not right and having to retrace his steps, tiptoeing past the heavy majestic door to the simple room to hide his shame. One kindly maid led him to the back door and left him beside the trash and he hurried home, the love within him so great his chest hurt. Once ensconced in his little cottage, he shook his clothes off and never found it within himself to replace them; called the office still in his under-things and then crawled into bed with the determination never to emerge again. He soon realised his error: not even his Finn was about to mutter and potter and the simmer sky pressed through the curtain. He could not force his thoughts past the pain in his chest long enough to be distracted and spent the rest of the day a naked lily, wilting on the bed.

***

From that point on, they held relations much against Nick’s will. Not that Jay had ever been anything but solicitous towards him and completely respectful of his wishes should he have wished to put an end to their sexual relationship. It was against Nick’s own will- he crafted his resolution the very night of the day he didn't make it to work, swearing to himself he had not been in love with Gatsby since the night of the party when the fireworks halo-ed him, that it was not his college sophomore year done over, that he was never going to fall in love with a man who was in love with the cousin he scorned and called her name whilst making love to him. He was _never_ going to love the man who thought he was the wrong cousin. And then Gatsby had called, the piercing screech rousing him from his bed out into the too-hot air of the night; calling not because Nick hadn’t called but because Daisy had not called, speaking in such a forlorn, wet, thick voice that Nick promised to be right over. The decision felt like the right one with his mouth around Jay’s cock.

Once the weekend died and a new beginning dawned he was sure he’d no longer be required as bed-warmer, then on Monday after arriving home from work he found an intricate nest-egg blue invitation on his door mat and so had begun the slow, anti-climactic slide into the comfy rocking boat that was the end of a summer. Life and work continued, though the parties did not. One evening not shortly after the whole damned mess, Jay telephoned asking if Nick wanted to come over for company, “I’m in the middle of organising the whole staff moving back in, old sport, so I’m afraid it’ll be a bit of a mess.”

“Actually,” Nick slotted the words easily from his mouth into the receiver, “Might you like to come over to my house?”

So, they began to court one another, their friendship deepening like the roots of a tree until their lives were practically inseparable.

Waking up one chilly night a long time after with the world still black and blue, he would remember what occurred after they hung up the conversation precluding Gatsby’s first night in his cottage with a sharp click: Daisy had called. Nick had never intended to pick up the receive and could only decide that the shock of the noise had removed whatever of his senses that would have pointed out that it was not going to be Jay a second time. Instead it was Daisy apologising with her voice full of money in that way that never actually said anything like an apology at all.

“How are you, Nicky?”

“I’m doing just fine,” surprised to find he meant it- it had been several days since the horrible event that stained everyone red with his scorn, everyone but for Jay, and he was finding himself anticipating with eager delight his life beginning all over again in the fall; a tangible measurement of seasons passing without the influence of careless people. When he asked, “How are you?” he did not mean it- it was just a required question as it was in the army when they asked a smooth-cheeked volunteer his if he was over the age of sixteen.

“Mmm,” she replied over the phone, voice yellow with sweetness. “Tom asked if you wanted to come over for dinner sometime.”

“I don’t want to go to dinner if Tom is there.”

“Me neither” she made a sound and it took a moment to realise she was laughing- he had never heard her laugh genuinely before. Not that it was in and of itself a very compelling laugh or funny joke, but the sheer honestly like cool water in a scorched desert made him laugh in return.

“Oh Nicky,” she sighed. “Do come over, it’s been so boring without you. We’ll celebrate your birthday at last. Jordan will be there- you remember Jordan, don’t you? Come over, Nicky, do- never mind Tom. We’ll make our own fun.”

He remembered agreeing, though not the date, and they talked until the conversation came to an end as naturally as the mouth of a river spilled into the sea.

That night, the first night Jay came over, Nick was finishing drying the dishes when Jay floated over and pressed against his back at the kitchen sink, warm and drowsy and hands roaming all over. The only view out of Nick’s windows was that of Gatsby’s mansion- the gilded bricks coveted the whole beach front the way a dog stalked the edges of its territory. That green light was only for Gatsby.

“Did Daisy ever call you, in the end?” Nick asked, then tasted bitterness in his mouth.

He froze, but Gatsby did not. “No, old sport,” his words were thick with impending sleep, belying his hometown of North Dakota and the soft, charmed seventeen year old he had created underneath the hardening brown shell of his childish body. “I never called her either, now I come to think of it. I was... _distracted_.”

There was no mistaking the leer and tease and tinkle of his tone, so Nick focused upon the cutlery in his hand, blushing as Jay pressed up against his backside, “Oh?”

“Mmhmm... you know, old sport, it’s the most curious thing- I sleep with the curtains open still, yet I sleep all the night through where before I couldn’t. Just staring- sometimes all night- at the green light at the end of her dock. Now I sleep.”

“You don’t sleep when I am in your bed.”

“Perhaps you tire me out and that’s why I sleep so well when you’re not there.”

“Liar, you long for me when I’m not there.” Trembling, he put the crockery and tea towel down and turned in Jay’s arm, marvelling at the strong, sturdy body that could hold him steady and kissed him hard enough to bruise. “I’ll show you tired out.”

Once Gatsby left in the morning, Nick called Daisy. “Ask Jordan to call me.” She often called him about noon at work, because the uncertainty of her own movements between hotels and clubs and private houses made her hard to find any other way. Whilst it might have been tactful to leave Daisy’s house, there was nothing either woman enjoyed as much as riling Daisy’s husband.

“Jordan?” her pools of eyes opened wide to reflect toe sky in her eyes still asleep in a state of surprise. “She’s right upstairs. I could-“

“No, thank you.” He hung up.

Jordan did not call that day, leaving him with a fretful lunch, nor the day after. Then, on the third day, just as Nick was guessing at wild ideas of corruption and exposition for every passerby on the street below as he dozed in his swivel-chair, the phone rang.

“Jordan?”

“Nick.”

Having established they were both who the other wanted a cold silence followed, though it would not be winter for many months yet. Guilt gnawed his bottom lip until it spilled out of him “I’m seeing someone.”

A sniff. “I know. However- I want to see you.”

“I want to see you, too.” He couldn’t have talked to her across a tea-table that day if he never saw her again for all eternity.

“Say it, Nick. Just say you never loved me and then it will all be over.” She was being kind, he realised. Being kind the only way she knew how.

“I- I enjoyed looking at you. I’m- I had to ask you to call me, because there was no way you could have had this conversation at Daisy’s house. And- and- I never loved you.”

“Because you do not like women.”

He about fell out of his chair, swallowing his stomach back down his throat, “What- no, I- Jordan of _course_ not, I- _how did you know_?”

“Hmph,” and rustling, as if she had sat back to balance her words on her chin before speaking them. “Women’s intuition.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, will you calm down, Nick- do you honestly think I would compare you and Tom and pick him over you?” Here, she sounded truly hurt, as if it had never been her intention to be a cold, hard, limited person with not a maternal bone in her body.

“You... you do a very good impression of being a rather heartless woman.”

Another disdainful noise, “At least I know I am convincing, I suppose. But- truly, I have little care you are seeing some other man; my only concern is you did not call me and finish things before that.”

“No- I-“ mind still reeling from not going to prison, he edged back onto his chair and tried to breathe. “That was partly why I wanted you to call. I want to- to apologise, for that and for- other things.”

The click of a lighter hissed on the other end, after exhaling a plume of blue smoke as cool as she was, she asked, “Oh?”

“Yes- yes- I” _feel hot under the collar_ “I act as thought I’ve a remarkable talent for reserving judgements- it was my secret pride, being privy to all the things men told me. Only I judge all alone, just without the confidence to say anything. I judged you all along...”

“In other words, I met another bad driver.”

The conversation she was referring to was nearly forgotten in Nick’s mind and took a while to resurface. “Yes, you did,” he agreed at length, wondering what she meant by ‘another’.

She laughed- she was, even in joy, nothing at all like anyone else he knew: a fierce, defensive, practical woman with questionable integrity.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t think either of us are going to get what we want,” Jordan replied eventually, laughter shut away into the box within her small body.

“What do you want?” he leaned forward in his chair, clutching the receiver with both hands, voice turning tight with urgency. “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it, I’ll-“

“No.” She took her time to answer- not pondering and delaying on his behalf but rather because she was enjoying a rather fine brand of cigarette, he knew, though it certainly was within her to be so cruel. “I don’t want you, that’s the problem.”

He slumped onto the floor and against his desk, losing the red and gold books balanced on the edge from his vision and floor cold through the knees of his trousers; hoping no one came in, pulling a pencil from his pocket and placing it ready as a prop two feet ahead of him just in case. “That seems to be my problem,” he confessed, wondering if his tea that morning had been sweetened not with sugar cubes but the dust from the piles in the Valley of Ashes.

“Mmm,” she tapped her cigarette on the receiver- to create more grey dust, beginning in her ash tray and soon to grow bigger. “You’re problem is you’re too riotous. Hypocritical and romantic, as well. But you’re a very complicated man, Carraway- you _feel_ things.”

“You feel, too. Remember, I only said you did a very good impression of heartlessness.”

“Of course I feel things,” her voice dripped with unhidden scorn. “I’ve had to learn self-control, and went too far.”

“How?”

A shrug, careless and uncaring, “I’m a woman.”

“You think _that’s_ my problem?”

“I think I am having this phone call at Daisy’s house, and the man you’re seeing doesn’t love you back.”

He squeezed his eyes shut- it was surprisingly companionable, not saying anything between them for a long while and going through the motions of being alone with one another on the end of the phone. At some point during his lunch hour, the building began to empty and as the suits and dresses trickled out onto the pavement for restaurants and parks, her voice started up again low and steady. “Throw him over, Nick. It’s no good if you don’t love each other in ways you both understand. Throw him over like you are me. Throw over your man and come to dinner tonight.”

“Not tonight. There are various- Tom will be there.”

“Let him come, I’ll break his nose.”

He’d have loved to go, to see her do it and do it on account of him. He sighed and hung his head. “No. But- I still want to see you. Another night.”

“I want to see you; I’ll break your nose.”

He shrugged, laughter pouring out of him like water, “At least it’s not my heart.” He could not stop laughing.

“ _Men_ ,” Jordan sniffed when he was done. “Throw him over, Nick. You deserve love as much as any of us do. Stop being so riotous and become a bit harsher like me- you’ll soon find someone who loves you back.”

He had no words in all of his half-finished novels to reply- no one in his novels had been like Jordan. “I’m sorry I wasn’t the one who loved you.”

“You were never going to be, but you were a good convenience for longer than I thought you would be. We’re still friends as far as I have friends, aren’t we?”

“Yes, of course we are.” The thought did not upset him. “I think I’ll like being friends with you, now I’ve got my head out of my ass.”

She laughed, “Part of me wishes I were in your office now so we might shake hands,” never before had she spoken whilst smiling.

“We will, when I next see you at dinner, we will,” he promised her sincerely.

He heard her smile again. “If you don’t I’ll break your nose,” she promised sweetly.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jordan is a sophisticated lesbian

One night, as they swum in Gatsby’s huge bed in the pitch blackness of his bedroom, Nick wondered what the man’s servants thought of his new comings and goings. Jay was quick to reassure him; “Oh, they’ are all consummate professionals, old sport, I can assure you. Wolfsheim helped me find them himself, so they wouldn’t cause any problems is someone bothering you? Because I’ll-“

“No, no, nothing like that,” Nick hurriedly reached across and squeezed his hand, ideas of despondent and moribund, black-suited people on the doorstep in the rain and out of their livelihoods on account of him. “Nothing is bothering me, I just wondered.”

“But you would tell me if something _was_ , wouldn’t you, old sport?”

He frowned, “Of course I would- what sort of question is that?” He had never intended for his tone to be quite so snappish, and a blush quickly bloomed though invisible in the dark, where all he could see were the silver curves of another body lying beside his- not even the green light was visible in the darkness outside. He wondered if Jay had noticed.

“Oh-“ Jay faltered- an occurrence e had never seen before and hoped never to witness again- as the anger bit him. “Well… it’s just you hardly ask for anything, old sport.”

There was no deflation or ablation to his anger, as he would have expected. Instead of dousing the flames, the answer only stoked him and his heart smouldered harder as he disliked the expression he could feel his own face twisting into. “And that’s a bad thing?” Veiled by the bruising of a night air as thick as it was hot he couldn’t see Jay’s face; they were floating upon a sea of oblivion with hints of grey to show the boundaries of everything that existed.

But he could picture it: a furrowed brow, the confusion dancing along his blue eyes, shoulders straight and stiff and looking as perfect as the man in the adverts for Arrow Collars.

“Of course not, Nick. I just found it curious, is all. I’ve never known anyone who asks so little.”

“I ask,” Nick retorted hotly, cheeks burning and pulling away when he felt Jay reach out to touch him. The movement left him oddly short of breath. “I asked Mr McKee _who I just met_ to sleep with me. I kissed you that night. I told you to come home that night- hell, I drove you home that night. You think just because I don’t want your money I don’t want you!”

Heavy silence fell upon them and Nick found himself only concerned with pulling air into his lungs, glad of the gloom to obscure his lover’s face, for surely the sight would have robbed him of breath entirely. All of a sudden he was very self-conscious of how loud his breathing was in a room devoid of all else. It rasped as the sound of a body dragged over the floor and he ducked his head away even though they couldn’t look at each other, feeling not only horribly, horribly embarrassed but a dirty feeling he tried to scrub away from his face with his hand, glad the late hour paled his blush into oblivion. “I’m sorry,” he began. “I don’t know why I got angry

“Oh, no, it’s no trouble at all old sport.” Yet he spoke in a tone absent from its owner, as if he had never been spoken to in such a way before and Nick vowed he never would be again, not within any of his limited power would he ever allow his American Dream to bear witness to such fury again. Not unless he was beyond sure Jay would respond in kind with fury burning lava through his ribs. It was unholy to hear uncertainty in that voice; absolutely Goddamn unholy, to hear that voice anything less than sure of itself and Nick screwed his eyes shut to match the pain in his chest as he drew in each ragged inhalation. Part of him longed to apologise further- flick the lights on and beg at the foot of the bed with a tear stained face and yet, to his horror, his mouth began to move quite apart from itself. Saying words he would swear on the Bible had never crossed his mind before.

“It’s just… people don’t want you to be _rich_ , Jay. They want you to have money. There’s a difference- a big difference in- in status and- and in class. You think all money is the same, but it’s not the right type of money to them, because they’ve never known anything but money. It’s not fair, it’s just how it is. You can’t change it.”

There was no reply. Not even a tiny, delicate or forlorn sound of acknowledgement to be mistaken for a dream-shattered whimper. Nick hated himself. Slowly, as slowly as Jay has realised the extent of his grief that first fateful night, he stretched out his arm, for a brief second it hung above him- as if he was reaching out for his own green light, or a weary Dutch sailor happening upon the new-found land at long last, all hopes combined into the shores of the fresh, green beast of life- and searched through the void until he touched the hard, real plains of Jay’s body. He felt soft and easy to wound. It only made Nick feel worse. Easily wounded. Silks rustled and he heard Gatsby’s head tilt, for he was Gatsby now, far away from him, then felt a hand intertwine with his.

“I fear I still don’t quite understand, old sport.”

Nick sighed and closed his eyes, though it was no different from having them open. Deep in his heart, he tried to find the words except there was no humanly way possible to articulate the golden bubble of class and he let himself sink to the bottom of the sea and dint open his eyes again until he touched the sea bed. “No. Me neither.” There was nothing that he could call to mind that he thought could ruin a boundless capacity to hope, refusing to try in case he was wrong.

Jay’s hand stayed in his ad they listened as the clock whittled away the hours until morning.

“So,” Jay began slowly, drawing out the question in a twinkling voice, sounding as if he had been born as far away from New York as possible. “Who is Mr McKee?”

“Oh _God_ ,” Nick curdled in embarrassment and hunched so low his ears brushed his shoulders. “You don’t want to know.”

“Yes I do.”

There was a gentle thump as he let his head fall back and hit the soft pillows. “Do you remember when I told you how Tom took me to that God-awful party?”

“Mm?”

“Mr McKee was a guest as well. He lived in the apartment two floors down and- well, we were both very bored at the party, you understand, and very drunk and so we left to get some cigarettes- _very drunk_ , you see. Completely inebriated. And he- I- we-“

“Nick.” His voice and the curve of his shoulder as he propped himself up on his elbow to lean down across to see his face cut off the babbling stream of his words. “You’re rambling.”

“No I am not I am merely trying to explain- to give you some exposition and we- I slept with him.” Embarrassment felt strained and familiar.

“You’d only just met the man?” The ensuing silence was answer enough. _“Nick!”_

“We were very drunk,” he attempted feebly. “And the party was very awful- I never did that at one of _yours_ , did I?”

“I don’t know. Did you?”

“No! Except for this one gentleman…”

“Oh my God” suddenly the room was alight with Jay’s laughter and they were floating upwards,, supported by golden bubbles. “Oh dear God, Nick; there I was wondering how you could be so forward asking me to sleep with you!”

Nick gave him a tentative shove and he collapsed on his elbow like a house of cards but kept on laughing. “Stop teasing- you’re making me out to be some sort of Sheik when really I’ve only had a healthy amount of experience!” Except he was laughing too, drunk on Jay’s happiness, almost wishing to flick on the lights to see the delight playing over those much-loved features. “Don’t dare try and pretend you were a virgin before we got together!”

“Of course not!” the affronted splutter was nothing short of comical; Nick could see the words like embers falling off a fire. “I was… I was… _well-versed_ , if you catch my drift, old sport, though I certainly never would dream to approach a man I’d just met!”

Something twanged deep within his chest and he could not help the smirk creeping up his face. “’Well-versed’?” he parroted, a paragon of naivety. “How many, do you think?”

Jay tilted is head and considered the question. “Throughout my entire life?”A nod. “…Four, in total.”

Now it was Nick’s turn to splutter. _“Four?_ Oh, God,” he fell back into the pillows a second time, wondering if he had been cursed to play the part of a scandalised dame.

Immediately, he felt a warm pressure and comforting touch at his elbow. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, old sport. I don’t think any less of you for having less experience than me-“

“More than you.”

“W- what?” if his insides were not alight and writhing, he was sure he would have found the speechless shock hilarious.

“I said,” in a valiant effort, he lifted his head and looked straight into Jay’s eyes. Even in the dark, he could find him. “I have slept with more people than you.”

“How many?”

He bit his lip, “A few?”

“Could you put an exact figure on it, old sport?”

He cast his eyes back, calculating, “Ten, maybe? No more than twenty, definitely. There was a couple in college. I lost count, during the war and all… the regiment I served in, we were all very… close.”

Silence reigned for rather a long time until it seemed to him that even the clock had run down completely and then eventually, softly, quietly, Jay said: “With all those men I am surprised you’d look at me.”

 _Oh_. The knotted feeling within his chest unravelled and got away from him before Nick even knew what he was saying, “Of course I did- more than looked, Jay, you’re perfect.”

He waved the compliment away and rolled over to turn the lights on. A grotesque reflection of the world took over the night outside the window and his eyes too such a long time to accustom to their new vision he almost didn’t hear Jay continue. “Hardly, old sport.”

“No, you are,” Nick promised. “You’re- I think you’re just great.” _Even if you are in love with my cousin_.

Eh, he’d take what he could get.

When Jay broke eye contact, the way he ducked his head made him look almost shy and Nick wanted to kiss him sweetly and tell him never to think suck untrue things ever again for the rest of his life. “Please, old sport. I didn’t finish high school, let alone had the means to attend a college.”

“That doesn’t matter to me!” he snapped hotly, grasping his shoulders and shaking him, bringing him up close to his anger and kissing him once. _I love you_. “I knew all about that when I kissed you.” _I’m as far from Daisy as you can get_. “I haven’t forgotten any of it and I’m still here.” _I’m a fool for you_. “Does that mean _anything_ to you?” _tell me you love me too_.

Jay looked at him, then at the hands on his shoulders, then looked back up at him and raised his hands to cover Nick’s own. “It means you are the truest friend I have ever had.”

Nick would take what he could get.

***

“I’m sorry if I upset you tonight.”

“I’m in your house in your bed, old sport. What makes you think I’m upset?”

“ _Jay._ ”

“Alright.I just… am failing to understand what the big deal was, old sport.”

“I’m failing to understand why you made it a big deal!”

“I didn’t!”

“No, you’re right. Apologies.”

“Just- _everyone_ was drinking, old sport! I know you don’t like to stand out in a crowd the way I do; wouldn’t it have been more conspicuous not to drink?”

“They shouldn’t be eavesdropping in the first place- it’s my right not to drink and it’s banned anyway, for Christ’s sakes.”

“Perhaps, then, it might have been prudent to tell me that _before_ we went to a speak-easy!”

“Why- no, no, you’re right again. I’m sorry, I should have thought about that. You don’t think I’ve have caused you any trouble the next time you go, do you, drawing so much attention to myself?”

“My God, no- a teetotaller is far from the strangest patron that particular club had tonight, old sport, I assure you. And don’t apologise- really. If you font want to drink then it’s none of my business, either.”

“But you’re hungry for an explanation, all the same?”

“Hah, you got my old sport. I’m as curious as an old biddy. Certainly you never went overboard at any of my parties, but you did partake.”

“Well it would have been rude not to.”

“You always were rather more curious than the majority of my guests.”

“I kept my clothes on, you mean.”

“Mm, though I’d certainly have been appreciative if you hadn’t.”

“Stop it, you.”

“Stop what, old sport?”

“Teasing!”

“I’m not!”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m- oh- _oh_.”

…

“Nice as this is, old sport, it hasn’t escaped my notice that you haven’t answered my question.”

“You didn’t ask me one, as far as I recall.”

“You were going to enlighten me as to why you have given up drinking, old sport.”

“I- well- do you _know_ how often you call people ‘old sport’?”

“It’s been brought up in conversation. Nick- do not answer if you don’t want, but at least stop avoiding the subject.”

“Huh… I just… after everything that happened, I figured that it would probably be better if I stopped.”

“I… don’t understand, old sport.”

“Jay, I _like_ being drunk, I do. That’s why I had to stop. This summer I drank more than I ever had in my life- even including the war when they’d give us rum before going over the top. It was… too much, though I don’t know if that makes any sense.”

“You were... worried you’d stop being able to live without it, perhaps?”

“ _Exactly_. I like being drunk. I like feeling drunk. I liked that feeling more than what was healthy.”

“I think I understand.”

“Do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“There are things- when I was in college, a classmate there- well, the whole experience was all very new to me and I was a bit of an insomniac when I was young. Anyway, he told me about _Veronal_ , and he let me have two of his sleeping tablets.”

“And I presume you slept better?”

“I slept brilliantly. And it was fine, for the first semester. Then I took them every night- which the label said was fine, so I didn’t worry. But I took them so I didn’t have to be awake. Before I went home for the summer, I left them in my dorm and they weren’t there when I came back. I’ve never dared taken anything like that again.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry I never told you.”

“How hypocritical would I be if I criticised keeping secrets?”

“That’s not true- actually, yes, yes it is. But then again you do like to be dramatic.”

“What a horrendous accusation, old sport!”

“Jay, you introduced yourself exactly at the time you knew the fireworks would go off.”

“Now listen here-“

“You’re house is two bedrooms short of being a palace.”

“Really, old sport, I don’t-“

“You threw hundreds of parties instead of just writing a letter.”

“That isn’t fair-“

“Yes it is.”

“Oh, do shut up, old sport.”

“…Make me?”

….

“Are you feeling quite alright, old sport?”

“Fine, Jay. Why d’you ask?”

“Nothing, nothing. You just sound a touch hoarse, is all.”

“Hmm. I _feel_ fine. Maybe I ought to cut down on cigarettes. I’ve been smoking rather a lot since I stopped drinking- that might be it.”

“Careful, old sport, else soon you won’t have any vices left.”

“You.”

“Ye-es, that’s true. Well, good night, Nick.”

“Goodnight, Jay.”

***

Autumn set in early that year and as the summer rusted and the flowers died Nick found himself developing a cough that was more annoyance than affliction, but there wasn’t any connection. The sunset made the leaves bleed an even deeper shade of crimson and he threw his head face up to the blaring white-yellow front of the cinema, advertising the fast-movie that the girls in the office wouldn’t stop talking about. He let a young couple enter in front of him and trailed in the wake just in time to be on the receiving end of the ticket concierge’s foul mood; a suspicious look throw his way for being a man to see a romantic movie with no girl to excuse himself. With no romantic partner of his own with which to fend off the miseries other people, he trudged down the long black corridor to the screen, ticket growing sweaty in his palm. It was not that he had any particular care for fast-movies of the stars of West Fiftieth or this film in particular- though forging an alliance with the women at work would be infinitely helpful. Merely, he had had a tepid day of drudging, no plans to brighten the prospect of the evening, and it was only Tuesday so he could not even look forward as the week declined into the week-end. And, well, he had hoped perhaps a fantasy of romance and true love would prove ripe distraction from his own emotional woes. He coughed quietly into his handkerchief as the credits began to roll up the screen and introduce the lead with a name he though he knew from one of the parties Gatsby had thrown.

If he thought about it, which Nick in spite f his best efforts to the contrary found himself doing rather a lot, the past summer felt an awful lot like the way things grew in fast movies; a rapid transitioning smoothly from one miracle to the next, with no pause to consider what was going on. On and on, until the tensions broiled over and one person or another snapped and broke the cycle. Of all the people to have snapped, Nick would never in a million years have thought it to be Daisy.

In some ways, he was grateful to her- if she had not broken Jay’s heart, Nick would never have dared try to fix it. Yet in other ways he loathed her more than he loathed anyone else in the whole menagerie of careless people: her name had never left Jay’s lips since they’d become lovers but she never left his eyes. Nick had sopped trying to make eye contact after breaking kisses now, because he knew Daisy would be looking back at him. And of course there had been the first time they had slept together and Jay had said her name, when he teased Nick about his vices and cut the conversation short when he hinted too overtly about the deeper feelings he stoked in his heart.

“You love me, you mean it, for as long as you live?”

“I can’t even think of other girls when I’ve got you.”

The slick, handsome, smiling gentleman of the silver screen cupped the delicate flower’s cheek and brushed her hair behind her ear before he kissed her the way ever woman wanted to be kissed and Nick buried his head in his hands.

It would all be so much easier if he could just hate Jay and Daisy both, but Daisy was his cousin and Jay was a god amongst men. How on earth was he meant to judge Daisy for falling in love with Tom without Gatsby there, when he felt close to a heart attack whenever he thought about life without Jay? In some other part of his body, he realised his chest ached under the weight of all the ‘I love you’s he had never spoken.

He wanted Jay Gatsby and James Gatz so badly that it hurt. _Jordan was right_ he thought, unable to fight off the bitterness coursing through him. The rows of seats around him were empty except for the couple he had seen previously, and they had no time for him, only each other, quiet mutterings glittering and their shoulders pressed together and hands brushing together. There was no one who he might confess his own loathsome misfortunes to and even fewer people who may be able to tell him the best course of action to take next; even less than that scant number who would not in an instant recoil at being privy to the knowledge his lover was a man. He had no one, no one but Gatsby and he didn’t even have half of him. Whatever part of himself he dedicated to his poorer neighbour was less than a tenth of what he dedicated to his work, his dreams, his infinitehope and incredible love. Was it always going to be this way? Was Nick Carraway simply a man who would forever need people more than they wanted him?

He knew the answer.

His chest hurt, his eyes stung, the movie was over and he was not a strong enough man to walk away.

It was dark out when he pursued the thronging streets in search of home, the stars tearful above him and the air cold in his mouth. Despite the late hour, the huge billboard that acted as custodian to the Valley of Ashes was still clearly visible from his train carriage under the moon. He was alone here, too, all other tired souls travelling in another compartment tonight. It was just him and T.J Eckleburg- impassive as ever- with no care or interest in the lifeless affections of men. _Have you seen this all before?_ Nick asked as he chugged by. _Yes_ those pupils answered, voice perhaps not naturally deep but very, very solemn and soon bored by one small man. _What is the answer_? But the train switched tracks and sped away and his question or the answer was lost in the metallic screech of the wind.

The little cottage curled fox-like into the shadows was asleep, his Finn long dismissed to whittle into retirement and Nick did not bother to turn the lights on as there was no chance of getting lost in his house.

Upon entering the bedroom, tie undone and jacket discarded, shows toed off, he found Jay asleep in his bed. There was little surprise in that- except by way of juxtaposition to his miserable thoughts all night. Hardly unable to contain his excitement as his feelings swam about his middle, Nick divested himself of the rest of his clothes and crawled into bed beside him, the pain in his chest lessening with each breathe that brought him closer to sleep.

***

Summer and its heat put in a swan song the next Thursday, lifting people’s moods as it made the air tremble and Nick had no qualms calling in sick to the office along with a million other clerks and dogsbodies, overjoyed at the idea of a long hot weekend alone with Jay. The truancy had been all Jay’s bright idea, but the boat ride to see the Statue of Liberty was all Nick’s and successful, given how Jay seized upon it with enthusiasm. The hydroplane could wait until the weekend, he declared, jumping up from where he sat dangling his bronze legs in the pool and running indoors to get changed with no care for the sparkling silver footprints he left over the plush carpets. So excited was he, he caught Nick on his way over the threshold, spun him round and kissed him and just as quickly was gone, leaving Nick red-faced and avoiding making eye contact with the gardener.

One hour later and this was how they found themselves: taking a picnic lunch bobbing up and down on Gatsby’s boat, tried to a post at the foot of the Island which the nice military man had _permission granted_ courtesy of Gatsby’s photograph with the men at Oxford, sun high and bleaching all the tension from their shoulders as the birds celebrated in long circles above their heads. With the grace of God himself, Jay fell back to look at the Lady in all her beauty, sun and shadows falling across his face in ways that belonged in the paintings of Michelangelo and the Louvre. Nick felt drunk on the sight, struggling to avoid an erection by focusing on the sandwich in his hand curling up at the corners moistly. His own worried had melted away, settled by the tranquillity of the day and the sea air; a warm pink sea filled every cavity of his chest and living and life and breathing had never felt so easy. _I love you_ he nearly said.

The smile he gave looking at Jay was not a deliberate act but rather an instinct. “Does your life have to keep going up like this, too?” asked Nick as he gestured to the Lady’s outstretched torch, remembering a conversation that felt longer ago than it was, when Jay outshone all the stars he looked to.

The soft petals of his mouth twisted into a smile of his own that it was a struggle not the kiss him, “I was just remembering the first time I saw her, old sport.”

“Lady Liberty?” replacing his untouched sandwich, he carefully lay beside him on the wooden veneer warmed by the sun, squinting up through the beams of light falling over the world to spy the very top of the goddess.

“Yes. Why, did you know old sport, not one person has committed suicide from her since she was built?”

That was… unexpected. “No, I didn’t. Every day’s a school day.”

Jay laughed, raised one hand and his fingers fanned out in his direction, stretching out- reaching for him- remembering what an unwise decision it was to cup his cheek and falling back to his side instead and yet Nick wasn’t disheartened for the very next moment he murmured, “Oh only you, Nick. Only you.” And he followed every word up and down with rapt attention as John to Jesus.

“Wolfsheim and I were rather close business partners by that point- it was he who convinced me to settle in New York rather than making the trek back to Louisville. Obviously Louisville, for there was no chance in hell I’d go back to North Dakota.

“’Everyone,’ he told me, ‘Everyone who is someone in this country goes to New York. You want to be someone? Go to New York.’ And I did. And look at me now. He used to say- hah, he used to say as well ‘they’re chasing the same things their ancestors did’. I think perhaps he meant that all these old-money types are hypocrites, but that wasn’t the way I took it, old sport. Oh no, _I_ took it to mean that if I was going to create myself fully as Gatsby, I must cut myself off completely from what I had been and everything I had ever known. Then Dai- well, I did.”

“You did.”

Tilting his face fully into the sun, he closed his eyes and Nick saw past the wealth and money and hope to the dream and the man and the boy and fell even more deeply in love, well aware of the forbidden subject that had nearly been spoken aloud. _I love you_ he nearly said. Sometimes he even nearly said it when Jay was doing something as mundane as eating breakfast.

“I remember,” those blue eyes peeked through just barely to fix upon the woman’s face far above them and see past even her. “Young, I was. Nowhere near as rich as what I am now- _feel_ , old sport, I could still feel the hunger and the cold and knew I was nowhere close to achieving all my dreams just yet. And then I saw her.”

“Give me your tired and your poor.” _Your huddled masses yearning to break free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send those, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door_. Nick had always loved imagining the other of exiles, closing his eyes as a young child as he hid behind his mother’s skirts despite being too old for the shameful act; growing through to adulthood and leaning upon the idea of being wretched as he came, trembling, into his body, into a man. He felt as far away from his childhood self as possible. Discretely, he took hold of Jay’s hand. “New York is a long way from Dakota.”

“Yes,” he breathed huskily, eyes fixed upon a boat newly arrived from Europe, its decks brimming with whites and Negros and Arabs and women alike. “I’ve come a very long way.”

Nick realised at some point he had propped himself up onto his elbows so as to better look at the sculpted marble face of his own dream and, upon realising his error, hastily reclined back again before anyone could notice. He lay there, beside his marvel, the world melting away as the sun rose higher to reach its apex and eclipse the statue to crown the Lady herself; lying beside his love at a place where no one had ever lost their life and looking up and then looking to Jay and only one thought came to his head.

 _I love you_ he nearly said.

***

“Oh” one single soft utterance was the only warning Nick received before he looked up to spy the unmistakeable figure of Tom Buchanan off in the distance, a rock in the middle of the sea, or perhaps Moses, given how the people making up the sea all swerved to avoid him on the bustling city streets. He was walking in the same direction as they and so had his back to them; a reprieve from the coldness of his eyes and what they could do to people.

Having regained his bearings he turned to Jay and watched his eyes dart around, no doubt trying to pick out a yellow flower in the crowd. Sighing, Nick plucked him away by the elbow. To see a man so great chasing a dream that was made unattainable by his own ability to hope hurt deadly, even had the two of them not been lovers.

A hiss through clenched teeth was the only warning Nick got before the roles between them turned on their head- the pressure at the small of his back suddenly increased, sharp enough to be mistaken for a bolt of pain and then Gatsby was at his heels, pushing and twisting them easily through the currents of people. If he thought it would stop once they were out of the crowd, it didn’t. if anything the elder man became more insistent and he felt fear rising in his throat as they hurtled through streets slowly turning to alleyways.

With such force, it was a moment before he realised they had come to a stop and he gasped for air, turning around to see Gatsby wide-eyed and wild, an air about him that made Nick skittish, “Jay, what-“

“I want you,” he growled, hands on his trousers and mouth on his neck.

“But- oh, God, Jay, wait! We’ll be arrested, what if-“

“Wolfsheim owns every building for two miles. And I don’t care-“

The warm summer air hit his skin as his fly opened and his breath froze in his throat. “Oh God,” he murmured, no longer meant as profanity but as an identifier of just who was on his knees before him. Hot and heavy his mouth sucked his cock and Nick threw his head back and moaned, world narrowing to the beat of his heart and the extraordinary things Jay was doing with his mouth. “God,” he prayed, words babbling downstream with increasing momentum. “God, Jay, God GodGod” and then- and then- and then-

Calm as a criminal, Jay stood and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, hair falling over his forehead in the heat. “Do you know, old sport,” he began as Nick buttoned his trousers, “I’ve been thinking of getting a cat.”

***

July turned most definitely to August with an explosion of colour heralding the imminent autumn; New York balanced upon the edge of a precipice, anticipating when the summer would end for good and between the blue shadows thrown up onto the skyscraper walls the likes of Meyer Wolfsheim renewed their work busier than ever and Jay slowly slipped through his fingers like grains of sand or golden coins clinking to the ground. _He’s busy_ , Nick would remind himself _busy with work_ and inevitably his thoughts would turn back to that great, ineffable being he called his neighbour and he would try to busy himself in his own work- bonds, the intangible money, or words, the inarticulation continuing as he tried ceaselessly to finish another novel that would remain unfinished.

 _This is a good thing_ he would tell himself, typewriter silent under his hands or stars silent over his head, _he doesn’t love you back_ and when that idea came to his thoughts he would invariably retire to bed and sleep as quick as he could. Unlike the recently-past three months, there was nothing with which to occupy himself except for the wiles and misadventures of fellow men and this sorry state of affairs led him to abandoning his typewriter many nights for the cool embrace of the veranda and the stars, who whilst as judgemental as Eckleburg, did not lock him within their gaze and thus were infinitely more bearable.

Completely surprising, it was then, to come home one evening, full of a restaurant’s soup of the day sitting like a rock in his gullet and a hunger of a deeper kind smouldering in his groin to find Jay atop the wooden railing, legs dangling above the ground and a look of child-like contentment on his face as if there was nowhere in the world he would rather be. Perhaps there wasn’t- lately Nick had been coming to the conclusion that it was far better to sit in a small house viewing a large, grand one than to live in a big house and have only as your view his dwelling, which was rather squalid by an objective comparison. At the very least a small house may feel lonely, but at least it was only built with one man in mind.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps, hand hovering awkwardly an inch or two above the bannister rail, “Hello.”

Jay smiled him, “Evening, old sport.”

It was like the sun coming out.

Nick felt all of his problems slide away until he was sure they had never existed in the first place. He blinked, and the curtain of reality fell back over his eyes and he frowned as he watched Jay struggle to explain what he was doing on Nick’s porch. “I was- I _know_ I’ve a key, old sport, but I’ve a phone call I need to take tomorrow morning, so I shan’t be able to stay the night. However I just… wanted to see you.”

“I wanted to see you, too,” he replied honestly. _I’ve missed you_ though he bit his tongue- they were only lovers. He had no right to take Jay away from his work and he’d no doubt he would if Nick asked him too. Instead he took hold of those soft hands and pulled him round to the back of the house and let him go to settle as a gentle petal would in the breeze on the table and chairs. “I’ll at least make tea.” A strange look came upon Jay’s face- a queer, curious look that he couldn’t place but had him half expecting he’d disregard the seating arrangements and trail after him to the kitchen like a lost puppy, but he felt the breeze against his back as he set the kettle to boil.

 _What do you want?_ He wondered, the thought dissolving into the back of his mind before it had even fully formed. Any other words got stuck in his throat and he coughed and sipped his tea in silence, trying to avoid looking at Jay whenever the man was looking at him so there was no need to navigate the ungainly pantomime of eye contact.

At last, he hummed out a little laugh-like sound and put his hand over Nick’s. “You’re quiet tonight, old sport.”

Slowly, he shrugged, “This writer is out of words tonight; I’m afraid I didn’t warn you I might be bad company.”

A teasing smile wept over his face, “My writer is tired out, is he? Oh, it’s no trouble at all, old sport. I hardly missed you for a song and dance.”

The idea of being _His_ writer hurt, even though just minutes before he was bemoaning not being anything to Gatsby whatsoever. _He doesn’t mean it_ the internal berating was stern, flushing the blush away with another sip of the scalding tea; it was merely a reference to an offer Gatsby had made months ago having first discovered Nick occasionally liked to sit at a typewriter and bleed. An offer of employment at one of his associates’ newspapers that was shot down by the recipient the minute he offered. He squirmed in his seat, remembering how awkwardly he had stuttered at excuses and refusals and apologies- in that order- and coughed to clear his throat and rid his ears of the burning marks of embarrassment, but that had the unwanted effect of drawing Gatsby’s attention back on him. Nick squeezed his eyes shut, unable to hear the Sound over the beat of his heart or feel the teacup in his fingers. Maybe he’s already dropped it and it was burning through his trousers as he sat.

Jay’s hand reached out again, this time to cup his cheek and slide down his neck to his shoulder. He had no trouble feeling _that_. “Are you feeling alright, old sport?” he asked, the question quivering in a tone of the utmost tenderness. “You don’t look so well.”

Blearily, Nick opened his eyes and looked out onto the Sound, staring long away into the endless black and silver water, Gatsby a mere shadow in the periphery of his vision, a darker shade of black against the dark water, and it took a rather long time for him to find any words with which to speak. “Don’t worry. I’m fine. I’m- just- perhaps- perhaps I’m coming down with a cold or something. My chest hurts.” On cue, he coughed. The malady rattled in his chest like thunder rolling in.

“I can go-“ Jay offered and there was a look on his face Nick didn’t like.

“No!” immediately he seized Jay’s wrist, the immediately he wondered if he ought to let go whilst tightening his grip. It was true that he was suddenly aware of the chest pains he had been experiencing for longer than he knew, but loneliness he was absolutely certain would only make it worse. “No- I mean- you can- I wouldn’t mind if you stayed. Not the night, I mean- I know you said you need to get home soon- but just stay a little longer, please. Only it seems stupid of you to gi, if you’ve missed me.”

At once he realised what a horribly presumptive thing it was to say and not even smooth-spoken to make up for such a damning shortfall but his hand would not let go of Jay’s. It took a moment to realise neither of them had moved. “Of course, old sport,” he murmured, voice low and exhilarating in the warm cocoon of the air, eyes no unbearably soft in something Nick suspected to be pity. “I’d like that very much.”

Companionable silence followed; the need for words had left them and the beat of the Sound became the air and nay cough that escaped a Darjeeling drowning they pretended was the rustle of some nocturnal creature in the bushes. When the moon struck eleven, Jay stood and Nick- in a fit of chivalry- walked him home across his matted lawn and round the edge of Gatsby’s neat, blue one to the back door where it spilled white fairy light over the patio stones and bleached the interior of the house from view. Nick pecked a discreet kiss at the corner of his mouth, “Will I see you tomorrow?”

Frowning, Jay shook his head, “Afraid not, old sport. After Detroit there’s a man come down from Chicago I’ll need to see. I’m probably going to be busy for the next week, I’m sorry. As soon as all the business is sorted I’ll take you somewhere and make up for it.”

“You don’t need to take me anywhere,” bolder, a kiss on the mouth, worshipful and dirty all at once; he pulled away to bid ‘good night’ and coughed instead, pressing his handkerchief to his own mouth and overcome with humiliation at the weakness of being at the bidding to the necessities of his body.

Once he was done, strong arms slipped round his waist and knocked his apologies aside and a marble handsome face came close in a way to suggest an imminent kiss. “I hope you feel better, old sport,” he said sincerely.

“Thank you,” Nick said once the kiss ended. “Goodnight, Jay.”

“Sleep well, old sport.” He waved once at the bottom of his garden- so large that he was too far to make out the infamous details of a much-loved face and disappeared into the light.

Following the unhappy estimate, he did not expect to hear a peep from the other side of the lawn until at least mid to late August. Yet when the phone rang and dragged him from sleep at two in the morning mere hours after he had worried and brooded over his own maladies until his chin dipped to his aching chest and his eyes fluttered shut, he knew it could be no one but Gatsby.

“So sorry to wake you, old sport” were the first words out of his mouth down the line to him. “I can call back.”

“Mm- what, but Chicago?” wakefulness came like salt dissolving into water. “No, it’s fine. Are you alright?”

“Fine! Why wouldn’t I be?”

“It’s two in the morning, Jay.”

“Ah. Well… actually I couldn’t sleep.”

Nick tutted, leaning lower and lower against the kitchen wall until the corner of the calendar ruffled his hair, “I bet you haven’t even gotten into bed yet, have you?”

“It’s rather big with only me in it!” came the defence, apologetic and prickly all at the same time.

“Buy a smaller bed, then, God knows you’re hardly lacking the funds. Why can’t you sleep?”

“Because I’m not _tired_!” Nick bit back a smirk, imagining the put in his mind’s eye. “No- don’t answer that, old sport, I know exactly what you’ll say. Just, oh God, Nick, I’m worried.”

Deliberately he breathed in before he replied, glad of the sudden shock to let him pause enough to pitch his words in a reassured and calm manner- he was a man cultivating a talent of reserving judgements, after all. “About tomorrow? Surely, Jay, there’s no need to be worried- you’ve had to meet with all kinds of his sort of men before.” Although he remained (much preferring to be) mostly in the dark as to how Jay earned his ridiculous wealth, he had the gist of it enough to know this meagre truth. Though the differences between bootlegging and sodomy were numerous, criminals had a natural affinity for one another.

“Yes, but I just keep worrying, old sport. What if he doesn’t like me?”

“Wait- _that’s_ \- no, no, sorry, ignore me. Does… um… would you lose much profit if he didn’t like you?”

“..No,” he admitted sheepishly. “Look here, Nick, I know it’s silly, but I just can’t help it. what if he doesn’t like me?”

“Tell him to go to hell.”

Startled laughter echoed down the phone, “Is that what _you_ would do?”

“Anyone who doesn’t like you can go to hell in my book,” Nick promised.

“I think that’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” Jay professed. “Thank you.”

“It’s alright. Do you think you can sleep now or do you still want me to distract you?”

“Oh?”

“No.”

“But!”

“No.” He reiterated firmly, though the corner of his mouth was twitching at the memories of all the other times they had experimented with _that_ over the telephone. “Tell me… tell me about that time in Oxford you never got the chance to tell me about. You know, with the penguins..?”

For the next half an hour he floated on a sea of golden charm and lyrics, the chorus consisting of multiple ‘old sport’s. Upon the crest of each wave his tongue rolled and dragged out words thing enough to snap or so they became pliable in his mouth and wrapped up and down in tantalising, inviting ways and the tide came in as he described every man in the necessary quintet to sneak _London Zoo_ penguins into the Dean’s private office whilst occupying said-headmaster in the university chapel after Sunday Service. Every so often Nick would turn away from the received to cough or clear his throat without interrupting the tale, but as the minute hand lingered somewhere between the nine and the twelve the burn of need overpowered him, brought upon by a particularly inefficient intake of the morning air, giving him no choice but to cough loud enough for Jay to stop talking. A wet, thick, foreign texture entered his mouth where it had not previously been before and he recoiled in horror at himself and the idea of having brought up the depths of his own being, taking no hesitation to spit discretely and away from his offending eyes into a tissue. Turning back to the receiver, pressing it against his ear hard enough to leave an imprint branded on his skin.

“Ah.” Jay was murmuring awkwardly, “I should let you go, old sport, I know you’re not well.”

“I’m fine” replied Nick even as he hesitated screwing up the paper rag as he spotted the spatters of pink there. Blood. _Oh shit_. “What happened after the Dean realised it was you?”

The minute hand had consumed another quarter of an hour before they concluded their talk and said goodbye- even with the words running into one another and thick with sleep, a dramatic _biennuit_ and certain level of ‘panache’ was clearly a necessity for his neighbour and it was only once he heard the phone line ‘click’ and cut off to tumble static did he hang up on his own end and move the pay closer inspection to the tissue balled into his palm. Consumption, Nick suspected. Or malaria. Or pneumonia. Brought upon by his association with a rotten crowd, the decay contagious and festering right down to his bones. His hands were steady as he unfolded the little crumpled handkerchief.

And there, crumpled but intact and unmistakeable in its realness, was a pink rose petal.

***

All thoughts of the late hour were forgotten as he dialled the landline directly to Jordan’s room at Daisy’s house. Even as he prayed she was settled in for the night and not gallivanting about New York at her own beck and call, his hands were as steady as those of his division’s chief medical officer under mortar bombing. _Why aren’t you shaking!_ he demanded of himself irrationally. “Sorry for calling you.” The sound of the telephone ringing grew and grew, until it couldn’t be contained within the walls of his little cottage, grew to such an extent that when Jordan did pick up- “Sorry for calling you” he repeated- it was not enough to hear her cold voice and Nick sobbed a noise that wasn’t a sob as his legs gave out and he fell to a hard sit on the floor, ripping his thumbnail on the skirting board and tears springing to his eyes with the sting.

“Why are you calling me?” Jordan asked.

“I’m sorry. It’s- are you alone?”

“Who else would be in my bedroom- Tom?”

Despite it all, he laughed, panic squeaking out like a deflated balloon. “Of course I don’t suspect such things of you, Miss Baker. Only- it’s strange and urgent.”

“Oh?” her mouth formed a perfect circle and her eyebrow formed a perfect curve. He wondered what she looked like newly-awake, cool but not made up and clad in pyjamas. “You’d best get on explaining it, then, hadn't you?”

“Right. Yes. Um-“ for all his floundering, he still had not been able to find the words. He almost snorted, _some writer I am!_ “You’re a clever woman.”

Her eyebrow raised a fraction higher. “Is this a love confession, Nick?” she murmured sultrily. “Because that isn’t how most men would start.”

“But as I am sure you are aware, Miss Baker: I am not most men. I coughed up a petal.”

“I beg your pardon?” shortly after: “Oh!” and then, “How long has this been happening?”

“Only tonight I coughed up a petal,” he crushed the offending object in his fist and leaned his head back against the chipboard wall of his kitchen. “But I haven’t been entirely well for some time.”

“Since you started shacking up with your new man?”

“What- I fail to see how that’s relevant-“ he sputtered, praying to God Tom wasn’t listening at her door.”

“Answer the question.”

“Yes.”

“Ah. Oh dear.”

“What” panic began to boil up orange between his aching ribs, he breathed in and could taste rubber and mustard gas. “You’re lucky- I had an anatomy phase as a child, you know.” She went on coolly, “”And I like reading in my spare time. Not that my parents approved, of course. Little girls did not care for blood, guts and gore, so I had to read under the covers. The only thing I can think of-“ the flare of a lighter interrupted and crackled to life. He could imagine her mouth in perfect clarity. “There is something called Hanahaki Disease, but that was meant to be fictional. It’s the only explanation.”

The idea that he was wracked with some hitherto unknown disease was not comforting, “What is Happy-Hanky disease?”

“Hanahaki,” she corrected without comment. “It’ll sound a little far-fetched, given how it isn’t meant to be real. But essentially your unrequited love for your man has to express itself in other ways, so…”

“So…?” he shook his head from side to side and raised both his eyebrows, searching in the darkness of his kitchen for something to hold on to.

“God you’re so dense. You coughed up a petal, Nick. Flowers are growing in your lungs.”

“F- I- I- _what_?” it was a good thing he was sitting down, he decided, clutching the receiver with both hands. “I- roses, Jordan! It was a rose petal and- roses have thorns!There’s _thorns_ in my lungs!”

“Yes, Nick, you’re a marvel of modern science. Do let me know when you’ve calmed down, won’t you?”

He held the phone at arm’s length and dropped it to the floor a foot from the ground and buried his head in his hands, struggling for breath and holding back sobs. A cool breeze twirled on the other end of the receiver. “Sappho alluded to the disease first; it’s on par with the Arthurian legends and not nearly as well-known, though I suppose there is a grain of truth in all the stories, now. Of course logically it must have died out, else can you imagine how society would be able to develop? But I read somewhere that’s why every time in the pictures the man confesses his love for the girl-“ scorn dripped from her voice like a hoard of diamonds “-there’s flowers in the shot. As a metaphor. One tiny particle left-over from millions of years ago when humans loved far too much. Couldn’t you fall out of love with him, Nick? It’s not hard- married couples do it all the time.”

She carried on for a while and when he put the phone back to his he’d gotten his breathing under control. “Jordan.”

“Hmm?”

“Sorry. You told me to tell you when I had stopped having a break down.”

A snort, “Your life is going to feel like one long break down for the foreseeable future, but thank you for the consideration.”

“Oh, God. Why is this happening to _me_? I’ve been in love before and didn’t have this.”

“Perhaps it’s an act of God so you can atone for your sins,” she mused in a pleased voice. “I always did wonder how Catholics denied sodomites were natural if the disease was real.”

“Easy- the same way all Catholics deny everything. They ignore problems until they go away.”

“A shame we’re not Catholics, then.”

“What will happen- if I ignore it?”

“You die.” A careless, one-shouldered shrug shadowed grooves into her nightdress. “Flowers grow until you die or you confess and the object of your affections loves you back. There’s some doubt over whether you need to _believe_ they love you back or not, but all the sources agree: you definitely have to confess to their face. And they can’t lie to you in return.”

“And they have to love you back.”

“And he has to love you back.”

“I’m… in a rather difficult spot then.”

“I’d say you do need to get your affairs in order, yes. When you die, can I have your teak bureau?”

“You can ransack my house if you want,” he made it a solemn vow. “So long as you read my novels before you burn them.”

Another cigarette lit, “What’s to say I shan’t publish them and take all the credit?”

“I’ll be dead silent on the matter.”

Jordan burst out laughing. When it tailed off into an attractive burst of stars, she sighed down the phone. He could nearly feel the breeze ruffle his hair, “Could you not just fall out of love with him, Nick? Would that be so hard?”

“That would be impossible” he assured her. “As impossible as any chance he loved me back.”

“Ah. You are rather screwed, then, aren’t you?”

In his lap he counted the petals he had accumulated since the start of their conversation. Seven. “Why roses?” he asked instead. “Is that why roses mean love, because people used to cough up roses?”

“No. there’s bits and pieces of people having all sorts of flowers. Nosegays, lavender, violets. There’s a story about coughing up Venus Fly Traps, though I hope Shakespeare was only joking. They general consensus is that it will be the other person’s favourite flower.”

 _Jay loves pink roses_.

“You know… as much as this is going to hurt, imagine how horrid it would be if a girl was forced to marry a man she dint love and then he died. All because of some stupid flowers. Do you think she would get the blame for not loving him back?”

“You sound like a suffragette, Nicholas.”

“I really think you should be.”

“I already am- how I live my life is no concern of mine.”

“Is there any other way?” he begged, on his hands and knees on his kitchen floor. “Anything else but confessing?”

“Old sawbones did try primitive surgeries. There’s no telling if any of them were successful. You might have months to live, maybe years.”

He closed his eyes and sat back down again, “Shit.”

“Point him in my direction and I’ll soon make him love you back.”

“According to you, that wouldn’t work.”

“Of course it wouldn’t… I’d try my best for you, though, if it would.”

“I know.”

The clock struck four and he coughed again. Eight. He lined them up in a row on the linoleum in front of him. “I should let you get back to bed. It’s late.”

“Early,” she corrected; he could see the third cigarette poised ready in her long fingers. “Will you be alright if I hang up?”

“I’ll have to be. Thanks, Jordan.”

“Goodnight.”

He heard the flick of the lighter a second before the call ended and moved slowly in the direction of his bedroom, but when he got there could only find the strength to sit atop the covers and wait for an acceptable hour to get ready for work. Jordan would not be sleeping, he knew. “That’s okay,” he spoke aloud to the empty room. “I’m not sleeping either.”

**Sheik: 1920s slang for a man who has a lot of sex/sex appeal

**The Arrow Man: the most famous ad campaign in US History for shirts, the model was based on the illustrator’s male lover

**Veronal- the most popular brand of sleeping pills in the 1920s

**the statue of liberty was under military control for most of the 1920s and there was no suicide there until 1929; it wasn’t clear whether people could visit


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hmmm... sorry it took so long to upload this chapter- it IS 10k words after all, but I also don't really feel this chapter, I struggled a lot and it doesn't feel as... fitzgeraldy? or as purple prose as the other two, if that makes sense? but the last chapter is in progress & should hopefully be quicker. three key things:  
> *there is period typical anti-Semitism in this chapter. it isn't portrayed in a good light, but it is there  
> **Guantanamo Bay for historical accuracy really should be Alcatraz or something of the sort, but it didn't fit the tone as well, so *shrugs*  
> *** Beauty and The Beast is historically accurate but quite possibly the title wasn't instantly recognizable with the story itself until later on down the line- Disney's first failed attempt at the movie was in 1938

The day the rumour got around that Myrtle and George Wilson went West on Tom Buchanan’s dime, Daisy had him over for dinner. It had been a fraught week leading up to the occasion and Nick would not have been a liar to say his nerves were shot, the unsightly buzz only compounding what he could honestly say had been the longest week of his existence. Dying was a strange thing- he’d have expected it would have made time seen shorter, not longer. Perhaps had Jay been around things would have been different, for the man pulled everyone within his vicinity into the world at the speed of a roller-coaster. Except he was caught up with whispers and dastardly men in dark suits who spread their palms upon the tables in front of them and so Nick had nothing to do but greet the dimming evenings with visits to every library in the city, pursuing any mention of Hanahaki Disease.

And yet again: he should have trusted Jordan. She was right on all accounts and Nick, in a strange bout of pettiness, was refusing to call her a third time. Life had changed irrevocably for him the night of the phone call, yet it hadn't changed at all. Funny, how epiphany could hit a man and yet once he was back on his feet he continued ambling down the same path. _Perhaps I am not so different from the careless after all_ he reflected with a mirthless smile, pulling up in his car and immediately being forced to relinquish the keys to a valet whose pristine white gloves poked from a coat too heavy for the season yet adorned because of the trim of golden brocade.

Dinner was even more excruciating than the last: a minefield of topics they were not allowed to touch. Each tinkle of plate and cutlery threatened to shatter the air. Thus silent apart from Tom’s enraged comments about every detail of living not ion some way related to how he had just had to pay the consequences of his actions for the first time in his life. He was livid about their being consequences, Nick knew, livid and taking it out on everyone around him as was his right as man of the house. Livid… and terribly confused, he saw, in the brief moments when he fell silent; Nick saw him frowning down at his expensive plate trying to make sense of the world around him.

Even just thinking it so bluntly felt rather too much like stating the obvious.

Jordan was conspicuous by her absence- which could have been easily explained away with any mention of female malady and wasn’t explained at all. The nurse wisely kept Pammy far away and Daisy murmured up and down about silly cotton wool-pink topics whilst Tom glowered and smouldered. All that was missing was the buzz of electric lighting to strum the air tense enough to snap.

Floundering in the sea of all this Nick picked at his food, appetite already a casualty of his tumultuous week prior and in no way helped by the fear that seized him any time breathlessness seized his chest, wondering if he’d be able to pass any stray petal off as table decoration if he could not swallow it down around the nibbles of _foie gras_. The cigarette smoking constantly as an eternal flame of Olympus at Tom’s side didn’t help, tobacco wilting in a gilt saucer repurposed as an ashtray.

“Put that horrid thing out, Tom, why don’t you?” beseeched Daisy to her husband accusingly as Nick coughed out a hasty excuse and fled the dining room, sputtering into his handkerchief. The heavy door shut behind him as he spilled out into the night air that had turned cold in comparison to the stifling heat of Tom Buchanan’s presence, cutting off all noise. Air was a relief, so fresh it may have been staining his lungs blue and he came to a slump against one of the cool marble pillars, straining out across the bay to spot Jay’s house amongst the stars. With how effectively the doors shut off all the sound in the world it came as a completely surprise, then, when a flush trill curled over his shoulder on the breeze. Daisy.

“Marvellous, Nicky. Wonderful acting- they should put you in the movies, truly. I thought we would have to sit with that _man_ all night.”

Would that it ever came down to a choice between him and Tom, Nick was well aware that he was the better pick, but he had never considered Daisy brave enough to make it.

“It…” the words seized and he cleared his throat. _It wasn’t an act_ , yet remarkably he could breathe better away from the smoke and he found himself enchanted by his cousin: she was smiling truly in perhaps the first time in all the time he had known her. Every excuse and apology he’s conjured up in order to go home vanished from his mind. He jutted out his arm and she looped her hand through, tangling them together. “Would you like to walk down to the dock?”

“Yes, let’s do. Why, do you know, I haven’t seen the beach here since we brought the place and the agent showed us round?”

With all mention of anything that could be related in any way to Gatsby gone, he cough seemed to coincidentally abdicate and he breathed in as deep as he could, clearing his throat again as they passed the windows to the dining hall in an action this time more deception than perfunctory. They left Tom to his newspapers and their opinions that concurred with him about what the world was coming to and walked down to the docks.

***

Dark water lapped at the docks and though it was more than likely as cold as it looked, without hesitation Daisy peeled her shoes off and dangled her legs over the side, kicking up silver fountains every so often. It took several moments before Nick realised that everything about them was shrouded in a green glow and with a mountain sense of horror, he craned his neck over the edge of the pier to see a battered old tin lamp burning through a window of green glass. The glass was not even clean. He nearly laughed; wondered what Jay’s reaction would be if he told him all his achievements of life had been for a rusty old _Coleman’s_ lantern. Up close, it was still impossible to pick out the huge mansion he knew lay curled across the bay. Even trying to picture it, that great primordial white house, it wouldn’t appear- unless its great glistening reflection rippled on the water, but if so he couldn’t tell it apart from the moon. Daisy smouldered silver in the night, twinkling like fairy lights and her face open and closed off all at the same time.

“I’ve never been down to the docks before,” she repeated.

“Will you come down again?”

“Perhaps. But in the day, though. I’d like to see if there are any fishes and- Nick are you _sure_ you’re alright?”

He had to wait for the coughing to cease before replying. “Fine,” he wheezed, eyes streaming. “Just the smoke. The air _was_ rather thick in there, you know.”

A delicate sniff, “The more anyone tells him to stop smoking, the more he does it.”

It was all Nick could do to hold back a start- never had his cousin been so open about the unhappiness of her matrimonial bliss before. “Oh,” he said instead before immediately kicking himself. What an inadequate thing to say.

Her arm squeezed his suddenly, briefly, before letting him go, “never mind. How are _you_ , Nicky? Jordan says you’ve got some new man on the go- you didn’t tell me!”

Did everyone in their family know he was a queer? Dear God, was nothing sacred?”

“It’s a rather complicated situation. Anyway, it’s not as if I can ever bring him home for dinner, can I?”

She laughed, “No, I suppose not. Don’t worry, Tom still doesn’t know. But then he’s as oblivious as they come, he didn’t even notice you weren’t drinking tonight.”

“Neither did you. Jordan told _me_ that- why is that, by the way?”

A shrug even more careless than any that had come before it, “I never really have. Except…” her eyes clouded over and Nick looked away, fully knowledgeable that the last time she drank was the eve before she married Tom and fully aware Jordan was not meant to have told him that, though it was only fair, really, wasn’t it? Everyone in his blood line knew of his riotous tumults of the heart towards his fellow men, so why couldn’t he?

“They said not to drink when I was pregnant, so I didn't. Afterwards... did you know I never knew good girls were meant to drink until I didn't start drinking again? The taste was vile. That was thrilling, though, and they couldn’t do anything about it.”

Nick tilted his head back up to the moon, thinking with his mouth open. At length, he replied, “That is the first time you have mentioned Pammy since I got here.” The irony of the situation, of course, was that she hadn’t mentioned her at all.

“No,” the sigh brushed over the surface of the sea to create faint ripples. “I might be trying to be a better person, Nick, but I’m not very good and I’m not at all maternal.”

“I don’t believe you- Jordan mentioned you and here took Pammy out somewhere to... something or other.”

An unladylike snort, “One trip doesn’t make a mother.” Silence, and then it all came gushing out in a rush. “Women like me aren’t meant to be mothers, Nick. That’s why we’re given the money for nannies and nurses. God, I didn't even want to be a mother- can you imagine me pregnant?”

Looking at her then, truly looking at her waif frame, slim hips, bird bone shoulders curling out and in like angel wings, the smooth shining golden hair with not a single strand out of place and not an inch of spare flesh or looseness betraying to the fact that she had borne a child. What must it be like, he wondered, to come out of such a battlefield unmarked? She had been completely unconscious as well, so she mustn’t have had any memory of the even either. A sort of detachment, he supposed, or a separation, as if her physical form had been positioned two inches to the left of her actual emotions.

A bitter laugh wrenched into existence. It was a chocked sound and Nick’s own throat stung in sympathy. “I don’t have to think, I just have to smile. God knows how people cope when they have to do both- I think I pity them,” tears rose higher, nearly too high to be heard; her voice became a tumbling howl of anguish. “And I just want to smile, I don’t want to- I want to be a fool but I’m not a fool and I don’t want that to be bragging or- even when I ripped that damn pearl necklace off I did it for _him_ , for him!”

Whatever fury had possessed her left and she slumped bonelessly into the side of his body “I want to go home,” Daisy murmured.

“You are home.”

“I want to go home,” Daisy repeated. When she lifted her head, her eyes were dry. She laughed her golden laugh, “Can you believe that, Nicky? I ripped Tom’s necklace off for a man. Jordan had to help Nanny string it back together, you know. I’ve never forgiven her for that, though all they could find was some cheap string the butler used to tie parcels with. I rather liked that: marrying Tom and wearing just a bit of cheap string.” She smiled, “I liked that.”

“Why are you telling me this?” it was the wrong thing to say and he didn't mean to say it but he had said it and it was too late.

She tilted her head. “I don’t know. Only I got to thinking the other night- are me and Myrtle so different? Is she any guiltier than what I am? But then it would all be Tom’s fault and I don’t think blaming everything on Tom is what a good person would do.”

Up until that last sentence he had been enjoying his cousin’s new found depths; now, it seemed appalling to picture her with anything other than her gilt.

He remembered what Myrtle Wilson had told him a season ago, “Have you ever considered divorcing Tom?”

“Never.” Her eyes glanced about furtively, as if they were discussing state secrets and risked being carried off to Guantanamo Bay at any moment.

“Why not? You know Jay could take care of you.” He _knew_ it was the wrong thing to say by the way his throat seized and he bent double on his knees, fishing his handkerchief out of his pocket and feeling awfully embarrassed at the undignified position and pulled away from the warm body beside him to lean further into the rough serge of his trousers. Clearing his throat, Daisy did the decent thing and pretended he had not just shattered the air for two hundred yards in all directions and merely leaned back against his shoulder when he recovered himself.

“Have you ever stopped yourself doing something because it would be just too hard?”

“Too many times.”

She met his watering eyes, “You know what the real kicker is, Nicky? Because we never go for it, we’ll never know if it’s worth it or not.”

“I know what the kicker is,” he confirmed. They went back to watching the Sound, breathing consumed under the noise of the tide pulsing in and out.

Nick wasn’t sure if he liked this Daisy.

Eventually conversation began to filter between them again like shards of glass and their shoulders began to sink lower, eyes grow heavier, moon rising over the horizon and reaching towards the summit, air prickling coolly at their flesh and trying to pick it from their bones and every so often another light winking off across the bay; but the world across the water was still alight with the twinkle of gas lamps and artificial stars and Jay’s huge mansion still indistinguishable. _Can he see us?_ Nick wondered, _across the bay?_ The green light and the girl herself side by side, with Nick the unwilling interloper, conspicuous by the fact that he was not absent through as good as- a black hole existing within his silhouette, a pitch black shadow puppet trying not to interrupt. He thought of Gatsby, alone in the huge white house that was the culmination of a life of dreaming a dream bigger than he was, surrounded by his wealth and looking out over the Sound to the two of them shivering at the end of Daisy’s dock and wondered he he’d feel.

Why did Nick never wonder how Nick felt?

It didn't matter. That’s why.

Talk between them was surprisingly easy in a way that wasn’t actually surprising- he had forgotten how Daisy used to be his favourite of all his cousins, even if she had hated them all equally and always longed to return to the cool halls of her own home. Words were easy, even if there was a certain half-suspicion of meaninglessness and Nick found himself smiling, laughing along with her and joking and teasing in a way he hadn’t done with anyone in a very long time who was not a lover. Jordan came up between them, floating up as a genie from a lamp between their fingers and stayed, cool, impervious ghost that lingered briefly against the air before trembling from existence like musical notes. Daisy smiled in a way that made his lower torso squirm with fear and she wrapped her arm around his tightly, the snake from the Garden of Eden.

“Oh, didn't you know?” Then she dropped a bombshell. “Jordan is one of those Sapphic women, Nick.”

He froze. _“What?_ ”

“Oh, you oblivious man, Nicky, you! She asked me to tell you- I owe her five dollars now because I bet you already knew!”

A lot of things were beginning to fall into place; his next question was slow in coming and tentative, aware it wasn’t his place. But now he had seen the truth behind all of the people in his life he couldn’t leave the question alone, “Are you in love with her?”

“No.” Her face fell and she churned the question over. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love with anyone... but I shan’t let anything hurt her.”

“Oh.” It didn't require an answer but he felt compelled to leave his mark upon the exchange. It wasn’t the answer he’d wanted her to give or the answer Daisy probably wanted, but then... was she required to give him the answer he wanted?

Sighing he looked away from her and back out over the huge water. For all he wanted to hate her: he couldn’t. She was twenty two, he realised distantly. Twenty two years old and she had been eighteen when all the things she’d been told she wanted came to her in the form of a man who looked at her the way all girls wanted to be looked at. The man had lied to her and left her and she married the man who was everything she had to want and who also cared for her after a fashion and had married him without so much as a shiver. He wasn’t sure if that made her brave, or if he admired her, but he was thirty and in love with the same man and none of them were going to get what they want and he was tired of hating all his friends.

“Daisy,” he spoke after a while. It was the first time he had used her name. _The green light does not seem so bright from her own dock_. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“Nothing you’re supposed to want makes you happy.”

Her mouth opened but the words never came. Instead, her eyes misted over and she looked somewhere beyond him before sweeping her gaze out over the Sound. “Oh,” she replied. He thought perhaps she would start crying except her eyes stayed dry and distant, looking upon her surrounding as if she had never seen them before.

Nothing else was said on the matter, but he knew if she could she would have said ‘Thank you’.

(Later on just before the end of the conversation, “Well if nothing else,” Daisy mused ugly just before the conversation came to an end, “I have at least found you and Jordan a beard, hmm?”)

The traipse back up to the huge mansion was long and Nick found himself unable to catch his breath or stop coughing. Had anyone claimed that his cousin knew nothing of being kind, he would have disputed them with all the energy he had left for she did him the utmost mercy in chattering over the grotesque noises that had no place within her vicinity as they tore from his mouth piecemeal.

Just before they entered the huge grand door she turned round to face him, “Say Nick,” she smiled devilishly. Strains of the wireless were bursting in random intervals through the open windows curtains fluttering at the touch of ghostly hands. “Remember when I said I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it?”

“Why, yes,” it came to mind vaguely, as fragments of nightmares did.

“That was July I said that and why, the longest day of the year is in June!” it wasn’t really all that funny or even really a metaphor, but they found it brilliantly hilarious and laughed until the notes struck the stars and moon; in spite of or perhaps to spite Tom who they knew was listening in.

He realised after it was also about Gatsby. Gatsby who seized his dream so fiercely he could not achieve it. Gatsby, whose dream surpassed even Him, Gatsby who grasped the whole of America in his fist and let it go, finding it lacking. Gatsby who held the entirely of the United States, perhaps the only man who ever could. Gatsby, whose means did not result in the end. Gatsby, who reached too high and fell. Nick closed his eyes and collected himself before climbing the stairs to Jordan’s room.

***

Jordan’s room was indistinguishable from the rest of Daisy’s house and it made Nick’s skin crawl, half expecting a spectral figure of judgement akin to one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse to emerge from the wall veneer. It was everything he had imagined it would be.

Perhaps many of his problems would be solved if he stopped spending so much time thinking about the inner lives of other people.

His new found ally in sodomy did not appear to have any of her immaculately-pruned feathers ruffled by a mad man bursting into her room late at night, “Daisy’s told you then, has she?”

It took a few moments before he realised she was talking about _that_. “Yes, yes she did! You didn’t tell me! I tell you about- about everything and you didn’t tell me anything- I’m- why tell me now, at a time like this?!”

“You’re the one dying needlessly, why should anyone else let that ruin their night?”

“I tell you everything!” he could not find the words for _that_.

The infamous brow rose a perilous fraction, “You have no one else to tell.”

His body sank into the chair across from her of its own free will. “I don’t.” sweeping over him were her eyes, like a shock of cold water up and down and he tried to breathe but she was wearing some sort of perfume that tickled his senses and he coughed again, now more used to the feeling than that of his clothes or his skin or Jay’s hand in his. Petals spilt into his hand. They came in twos and threes now, some of them had drops of blood dried into the pink creases where they’d detached from the main flower.

“Don’t make a mess on the upholstery, that’s hand-dyed leather.” She passed him a tissue (yet another, there was already one in each of his pockets) though when he found the gall to raise his head and face her again, her expression was a completely clouded sky and he couldn’t understand anything. “Here,” she held in her hand outstretched a starched and stiff piece of folded over paper.

For reasons unbeknownst to him, he was reluctant to take it although he did, “What’s that?”

Tutting and blowing smoke rings from her cigarette, she pulled her hand back and ticked it somewhere amongst her shimmering clothes. Perfectly poised; shoulders thrown back and chin held high, eyes imperturbable and grey, he realised now. _All those months of looking at her and I never knew her eyes were grey._

She said, “Well it’s either confess, or try to find a surgeon who knows enough about an obscure, fictional disease to operate on you- start looking now, because you’ll be nearly dead before you find one who believes you.”

With somewhat of a struggle given he was reluctant to relinquish his hold on the tissue, he unfolded the note. A list of doctors and surgeons’ names and addresses sprung up in crisp blue ink. How late into the night had she stayed up finding these for him?

Gratitude would not take shape on his tongue and it took a shameful amount of time before he could look close to her eyes, “I am very lucky you had an anatomy phase as a child.”

Perhaps she understood. Perhaps she didn’t. No emotion was visible upon her autumn countenance, after all it wasn’t his novel to read, but she had wanted him to know she loved him and he did. _He did._

He sighed deeper and let it sink him further into the overstuffed armchair, “So… you and Daisy?”

“Shush!” her face cracked- winter ice cracking on the surface of a pond- and she sat forward, eyes darting around wildly in their search for Tom. Which of the two women in the house Tom would hate more, he couldn’t guess. “What if he hears?”

“We’re hardly the only ones going to hell in this house.”

“No, that is, that is true,” in excruciating, jerky increments she leant back on the divan. “In all honesty, they can say what they like about me- they already do. But… I have a career to think about.”

Immediately he was flooded with admiration for her; for being in love with Daisy and yet not falling prey to this disease of the heart herself- for being such a damn good golfer- for living- really _living_ \- for loving- for being- for lying- _I adore you_ he realised. Unlike with Jay that was no surprise. He laughed an inadvertent but much-needed sound. Her eyes fixed upon him angrily, “What is it?”

“Not about _you_ ,” he hastened to promise, still mirthful. “It’s just all so dreadfully improper, me being in your room so late. But we’re not being improper and it’s improper that we’re not.”

The curves of her own mouth ascended into a golden smile, “We are all the more improper for not being improper.” They laughed together and he was glad to be with her now, instead of over the telephone, glad to be with her again because he enjoyed looking at her and talking with her and he thought perhaps she enjoyed him, too.

For an errant eavesdropper it may have appeared all their focus was upon the strange workings of Hanahaki ravaging his chest cavity but that would have been an untrue picture, lacking the credit due to him for keeping the conversation consistently away from the topic, for it lay heavy between them and they could not stop their eyes from glancing at the elephant in the room occasionally. However it remained limited to casual events of a crowded conversation that paced itself with no regularity, absorbing them into the matters of other cheap personal affairs the same way it felt to stand on a crowded night and look up to the advertisements and neon signs of Times Square and become dizzy with it. Inevitably, though, the tides turned against him again, swirling around to trap him there and he was a poor swimmer that struggled even with just treading water when not wracked with horrid attacks of coughing. Because his love for the man named Gatsby was an unchanging star in the sky, it would unavoidably appear when the sun went down again and long into the night, when they were drunk on exhaustion and friendship, he coughed so much he stayed bent over double with his elbows resting on his knees and his head hanging down after it was all over, looking at the pink rose petals that were scattered over the dark blue carpet at his feet in some blasphemous attempt at a romantic gesture or wedding ceremony.

In the corner of his eyes he could see Jordan raising her chin again to balance these events with her world view- she had dropped the act whilst he was incapacitated in favour of observing the untidy spectacle that was Nick Carraway’s life with pure, unadulterated curiosity.

“Pink roses,” she intoned with a voice completely disinterested. “So I might not know who he is, but I know his favourite flower will be pink roses. Pink roses, meant to symbolise pure affection and true happiness- though of course that whole business about the language of flowers was crafted in the forties and there’s no way of telling if that’s actually what flowers mean.”

“Are you sure it isn’t just tuberculosis?” he asked weakly.

With one fluid movement she slid to the edge of her seat, swept up a petal between her thumb and forefinger and held it up to eye level. Little crests made of his spit topped the waves and crinkled edges and her fingernail was growing red from the drop of blood underneath it. She was sure.

“What happens next- after petals, I mean.”

“It never stops, if that’s what you’re asking. Give it time and the flowers in your lungs will be so rife you’ll cough them up whole. They might turn to red roses or that might be just the blood, you won’t be able to tell. Chest pains are the first symptom. Then coughing up petals and flowers. Throwing up blood and flowers with the stems will be next. The final symptom is, obviously, death.”

“Obviously.... I don’t remember that part in _Beauty and the Beast_.” It was a poor, weak joke that didn’t even make much sense upon close examination, but then again it was coming from a poor, weak man so perhaps that was why.

“Stop avoiding the question, Nick.”

“You didn't ask me one!” he snarled.

If she was shocked by his mercurial turn to anger, there was nothing to show for it, “Who is he?”

“I can’t tell you- but...” he ran his hands through his hair and blinked up at her through his eye lashes. The light of the chandelier was behind her head and illuminated her in such a way that the curve of her cheek glowered a pale gold. Like the break of first sunrise after long hard winter. Or the small curve of the world a man would see as she closed his eyes for the final time. “What you said before, about confessing. If I do that and he rejects me outright, what’ll happen? Dying at a man’s feet seem rather extreme revenge for not loving me back.” her face was not kind and he was grateful because he did not think he could bear it otherwise.

“I don’t know.”

The physical effects of the disease itself were irrelevant; Nick knew it would kill him if Jay didn't love him back. Tentatively, with the greatest expectation he would be rebuffed after the first millisecond of contact, he reached across their bent, close-together knees and took her hand. She startled and his looped fingers fell down to circle her slim wrist and she did not pull away from him. “If there is a life after this one,” he murmured, “I hope I remember to heed your advice and be a little less riotous.” She readjusted her fingers and clenched his hand tightly. His hands were shaking. He smiled. A handshake. “At least you don’t have to go to the trouble of breaking my nose.”

Jordan lit a cigarette with her free hand and still didn't pull away. “I hope you don’t die,” she whispered after a long time, when she thought he had already fallen asleep.

***

New York City was hurtling through a time of the utmost advancement and scientists were delving into the intricacies of life itself, to discover the meaning of everything. Sooner or later, Jay told Nick most assuredly, they would figure out if even God existed. _They only would have to look at you_ Nick didn't say. He had gotten very good at biting his tongue around his lover- a skill that served him well with every petal and half-dead rose bud that tried to crawl up out of his throat.

Why then many scientists of the no longer staid profession believed the pursuit of God lay within the uncovering the meanings behind every position in which ordinary people slept, Nick couldn’t fathom. But Jay had pointed out the article to him the other day; tucked snugly into the corner of one broadsheet or another and there was little else to occupy his mind as he sat sleepless watching Jay sleep and it was too quiet to turn to his typewriter. He supposed it oughtn’t to be surprising- Jay had told him he had attended the World’s Fair in San Francisco back in ‘fifteen by mere chance and accident, so his enthusiasm for the new discoveries of life was well-documented. (In the far corners of his mind, he wondered what Jay would say if he told him of Hanahaki Disease and all it entailed and always cut the thoughts short. If nothing else, the sex would come to an immediate halt.) Nick had argued that perhaps it was nothing so complicated except that which individuals found the most optimal position to spend eight hours a day and Gatsby ‘pah’-ed the idea and Nick silenced him with a kiss. On his side, arms reaching out to the other side of the bed and knees bent up carefully towards his chest: Jay was yearning. Complicated and cynical and naïve all at the same time. Reaching, Nick knew, reaching out tremulously across the bay for Daisy, who could not even begin to understand what she wanted. Closing his eyes, sliding down the headboard onto the pillows to fall asleep, Nick found everything was too loud and not enough at the same time. His little cottage hummed away at a contented existence, growing from the shadows on the lawn and snuggly hidden under the trees. The world expanded in a rush away from his house to sweep in a huge blue swath of grass into Gatsby’s mansion, a blazing white star fell to Earth and to a bird flying high enough a mere thumbprint. The bird a tiny speck as it flew over the narrow Sound that slid in the Atlantic Ocean, darker than the night sky and reflecting more of the stars, a still black mirror covering seemingly half the world, flying long into the night in search of morning and morning never breaking- not even flapping its wings but simply held aloft in the still air in an act of God and flying straight on until morning. When was morning?

Four hours, if Nick read the clock face correctly in the dark, more or less if he didn’t.

Morning was never coming and the bird would never stop flying- even if it tired it would never drop or plunge into the sea- an innocent Icarus and it would never feel the cold water or heave in the instinctual gasp that the sudden change in temperature forced out of you as sacrifice even as the momentum plunged you deeper s instead of air in your mouth you were swallowing water, salt stinging your eyes and your mouth and your body kicking or not kicking with no difference because even if you could taste oil spilled from a boat no one was coming and swallowing as much as you could so your body sunk deeper and deeper to the seabed and you starved the crows of your corpse, your body still betraying you even as you tried to embrace its demise because _you need to get a hold of yourself Nick_.

Startled, he gasped in air as he realised he wasn’t drowning. The act was thoughtless and the consequence was to set him off on another coughing fit and he’d barely the presence of mind to cover his mouth, let alone hurry to the bathroom and lock the door. Creaking bed springs were the only warning he got before the man in his bed was out of his bed and knocking on the door, “Nick? Nick, old sport, are you alright?”

Jay Gatsby was the last person Nick wanted right now. _At least I’m at home_ he thought miserably as his chest refused to go on strike and stop seizing. There was a marble suite in Jay’s en-suite that he was sure must be worth twice his life put together, coughing up blood into that would be just rude. His chest _hurt_ , though, and he braced his elbows on the sink, edge too thin and they slipped into the basin itself and he could feel water begin to seep through his pyjama shirt and couldn’t bring himself to care- there was still an unnecessarily big clump of petals refusing to dislodge from his throat and he couldn’t stop coughing until he spat it and a mouthful of blood and bile out to crown the mess of peals congealing in the skink. He took his first fresh breath of the day and sobbed. Whether the noise made it beyond the door or that just the previous noises had ceased, the handle rattled again. Nick rested his forehead against the mirror, able to observe only the blanched cheek of his reflection.

“Nick!” was Jay worried about him? _Not for the reason I want him to be_. He fished another petal out from under his tongue. _He doesn’t love you back, Nick_. Another two petals and closed his eyes. Dying was taking such a long _time_ \- it had been six weeks this coming Friday that he’d coughed up the first petal and one dark part of him that had stayed behind in the trenches every time he went over the top was begging for it all to end sooner. Part of him wanted to die right then and there and let Jay break the door down to find the petals in the sink. And his body, of course. Jay called his name again… the lock was of the same average standard as everything else in his little cottage and would not hold up much longer.

“It’s alright, Jay,” he called, voice rough and quiet. He did not sound even to his own ears remotely like Nick Carraway, all-rounded man. “I just had to get up to use the bathroom. Go back to bed, I’m alright.”

All quiet on the bedroom front.

“Old sport,” he began at great length and Nick wrenched away m his slumped, half-toppled over position with a surge of anger, _don’t you dare try and tell me some relative of yours died of lung cancer- you didn’t even_ like _your relatives!_ He didn't. One. Two. Three. Four. Five footsteps. The mattress-groaned twice. Jay had gone back to bed.

Nick could finally fucking breathe again and took a moment to simply be still, petals and blood spattered the rink and there was blood on the wall tiles and blood round his moth and his hands were shaking where he wouldn’t look at them and there was a weight on his cheat in the shape of Jay Gatsby. And five minutes later, the sink was spotless, the petals were hidden at the bottom of the trash can and Nick turned the light off and unlocked the door, only to be met by a wide awake lover sat anxiously waiting for him on the bed. _You make this hard_ Nick thought, _why’d you have to be so nice?_ Surely no other man would be so kind and considerate to his mistress.

Avoiding eye contact wherever possible, he slid under the covers with his back to Jay and turned the lights off. It was as if he’d flicked a two-way switch: the instant darkness descended, the words and questions came pouring out and he felt ungodly hot where Jay pressed himself carefully to curl round his back. A brief reprieve of the barest millisecond and then he heard all concern and fear in the timbre of all hope: “I really wish you would consider going to see a doctor, old sport.”

“It’s just a cold, Jay, I told you.”

“I’d just feel more comfortable knowing you’ve had a professional opinion, old sport.”

“What, because you don’t trust mine? No- no, I didn't mean that, I’m sorry, I’m just tired.”

He pressed closer. “I know, I just worry about you.”

“Thank you. I know.” _You’re too nice. That makes this hard_.

***

“Jay? Wake up Jay! It’s only a nightmare.”

He jolted awake with violent spasms, seizing his wrists in a vice-like grip.in the morning, he would watch Jay stumble back across the lawn and look down at his wrists with bruises so dark it would seem as if the night itself still held him fast and when he looked up again, Jay would have blinked indoors in a flash. All of this before breakfast or even before remembering his name was Nick.

***

“I do wish you’d talk to me, Jay. Or at least tell me what I can do to help. That’s the third nightmare you’ve had in as many weeks.”

“Oh? What? Oh-“he waved away the idea from where his head hung blearily over the toast rack.

***

“Enough of this- I’ve had- I’m going home.”

“But- what- fine. Fine. I’ll see you later?”

No answer. Nick tossed and turned all the next night, the bloodied roses he coughed up warmer than the other man’s side of the bed.

***

The edge of the bedsheet fluttered against the mattress like the flap of a bird’s wing as he fucked Nick beneath it.

***

“Do you want...” an eyebrow quirked in the shape of a question mark.

“No. No, thank you. Only- I’m rather tired and my throat is too sore to be doing...” this time, the cough was fake.

The concern jumping into Jay’s eyes was not, “My apologies, old sport. I wasn’t thinking.”

***

Meyer Wolfsheim and the bar hidden behind the bakery on 47th Street were not at all like Nick was expecting- not that Nick Carraway often pondered the typical day to day criminals and speakeasies. _What a liar_ he accused himself as Jay led him up a huge, impractical staircase. It was in no way fancy or gilded like even the servants’ quarters at Jay’s house but it grew right out of the middle of the dance floor and consequently was not inconspicuous in the slightest and Nick’s head reeled with the vertigo if all eyes in the place on him. He had been to a speak easy only twice in his life and the second time was that night; torturous as the night seemed at the time, hindsight allowed him the luxury of viewing the occasion as a success even if he emerged from it with an unexpected ally in the biggest criminal in New York.

Meyer Wolfsheim was a perfect gentleman. So much so that Nick would forget about the strange, cagey mutters of supposed code between him and Jay until much, much later. For example: whilst Nick busied himself with trying not to stare too long or not enough at the modern girl who took his coat in the clock room (the jacket was a necessary, he had insisted before leaving the house, and readily relinquished to the cloakroom girl after he spent the walk over convinced every passer-by judged him for wearing a coat in a season still counted as summer.) Wolfsheim hissed to Jay when both thought he couldn’t hear them, “You and your insecurities, Gatsby.” To which the reply came too small to be audible though nevertheless had a sheepish undercurrent to it. Although it was no doubt a very silly thing to think, he was secretly pleased. _I’m the only one who calls him Jay_. It was a nice feeling.

Initially the prospect of a night out on the town with both his lover and his lover’s criminal associate was less then appealing, but then Jay had spoken tenderly and made several gentle touches on his arm with his fingertips, caring and kind; overly solicitous and insisting that of course they wouldn’t go out if he didn’t feel up to it. Nick in response had glared up at him from where he sat on the edge of the bed, bristling through the curtain of his lank fringe falling over his face and announced that they would go just as soon as he’d washed his hair.

With Jay’s arm warm around his shoulders as they strolled up the dusky streets in pursuit of a good time, stars overhead peering from the skirts of a purple and orange dusk, Friday, so he was free of life for another two days, the promise of exciting and riotous things within the next hour and even more to come once those had passed. The only thing tethering him to this earth being Jay’s arm; heavens above them and heavens within him as Jay opened up every limitation he had ever placed upon himself. Wild, unlikely stories that made him laugh and they ambled down the streets together like the tide or running a three-legged race, never inseparable and alternating who lead with each step.

Whilst that had been more than acceptable as they played the part of nondescript passer-by’s, Nick was surprised when Jay not only took his elbow to help him up the stairs but then ran his hand down the length of his forearm to grasp his and pull him after Meyer Wolfsheim to a private corner booth _and then_ pulled his chair out for him to sit down. Whatever mewling part of him was affronted at this delicate treatment was dedicated alongside the rest of his sensible brain to being horrified at the blatant affection, more horrified that he was enjoying the attention, yet even more horror to come as he realised he had lost control over his facial expressions some time ago and for a second his own deep desires had shone up at Jay like treachery from the sun. Trying to school his emotions and crush them down into a tiny ball- in vain, as he felt his mouth twist with anxiety- movement two booths over caught his eye- at first he thought it was two birds or penguins reuniting after a long absence and then upon closer inspection to avoid the eyes of everyone at his table he realised it was two men kissing. Breathe left him in a quiet, gusty “Oh”. Sweeping his eyes to the other booths and the dance floor, he saw men dancing with men and women dancing with women nd men dancing with women and all this too and not just that but whites and Negros and Arabs all together.

Turning back to his own company, Meyer Wolfsheim looked him in the eyes with an expression of his own that was nearly disinterested, “We are all queer here, yes?”

Nick’s heart lifted and he smiled.

****

Dinner went well, but as the hours war on Nick’s mood began to sink. Partly because he was scared to cough in a place like this, in case one of the other patrons took it as either an insult or a coded message and a bank would be robbed tomorrow morning on his say so. Otherwise it was the usual despairs that had been gnawing away at his consciousness for the last eight weeks. Love, lying, life... any synonym for illness that began with the letter ‘L’. Quite how Jay was so cheerful was a mystery, given that Nick was exhausted after waking up with his dreams each night and he hadn’t seen the elder man in a state of subconscious for more days than he could count on both hands. With another subtle cough into the thin air, he did his utmost to hold back a grimace as he washed down a petal with his coffee. It was later in the night now, past evening or dinner, when it was socially acceptable for a man to move to another table for a short period of time when he spotted ‘’a fellow I know from college, old sport!’’ Jay explained with a dazzling grin, haring off as the college ma beckoned him over. The minute he was out of earshot and with his back to their dark corner, Nick coughed into his handkerchief, the feeling now more familiar to him than that of kissing.

With no more animation than that of still water, Wolfsheim- who looked no happier at the prospect of Nick’s sole company than Nick did his- remarked, “Gatsby did not go to college.”

“He went to Oxford,” Nick argued vehemently, less because it was true and more out of a sense of duty.

“Ah, yes. He is an Oggsford man. Yet he is stupid, too. Stupid not to realise you hide something from him.” Pale eyes framed with perched gold spectacles fixed him into place like a dead butterfly. “When I first met you, I did not have you down as a good liar. Anyone younger than my smoking habit I struggle to take seriously. Well done. There are not many that fool Meyer Wolfsheim.”

He flushed. Without a mirror he had no way of knowing if it was the same shade of pink as rose petals. “I’m not a liar- I don’t fool him and I’m not fooling you now.”

“No, then perhaps ‘liar’ is the wrong word. Hero worship? Certainly I know worship when I see it and I see it with you as I see it in the Synagogue. You worship Gatsby and will not allow even yourself to ruin this.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He fixed his gaze upon the nearest inanimate object. A painting: a long expanse of flowers and blue and, honestly, it wouldn’t surprise him if the Monet was stolen and whichever museum that was supposedly housing it home to a cheap counterfeit.

“Yes you do. Tell me, is it tuberculosis?”

“No. Not that. Nothing-“ his heart cowered away in the deepest darkest part of his ribcage. “Nothing he will be able to fix.”

“I have lived a long time, Mister Carraway.” Meyer Wolfsheim handed the words down not unkindly. “People and life surprise you- you may go home and find a duck on your settee. Life surprises you.”

He laughed and coughed and didn't stop laughing, “What?”

Eyes twinkled and disappeared being the white shade bisecting the lenses of his spectacles, “Life can surprise you, hmm? May surprise you what your boyfriend can fix.”

“No!” sudden, immoveable conviction seized him. “Ja- he can’t fix this, Mr Wolfsheim. Not even if it old him- not that I will. It would... it would be wrong to put that on him.”

Sighing, he waved the waiter over and magic-ed them both brand new full coffee cups onto their saucers. The mocha was thick and hot and creamy on his first sip and he drink it down without giving it ample time to cool off, fighting not to burn his tongue or give himself a foamy moustache as he tasted something other than rotting roses.

“You are trying very hard to be a good man, but how do you tell apart from simply being scared of consequences of your actions?”

 _Does he think I have tuberculosis, or is he just a strange, kind old man?_ “I’m afraid I don’t quite know how to answer your question Mr Wolfsheim, sir. Just what I can and can’t live with. And I know I couldn’t live with the knowledge that I had done horrible things”

“And how do you reconcile this with the horrible things you have already done? And how do you stand Gatsby knowing all horrible things he’s done?”

The answer was out of his mouth before he could even think and this, in its blindness, was the closest thing to religion Nick had ever known, “It’s not wrong if it’s Jay.”

“Hero worship. See, what do I tell you?”

Any answer he could have come up with- though he would have been forced to admit to himself that they were all laughable and inadequate- was lost in a horrific bout of coughing as he caught the sparkle of Jay’s tie pin in the ow lamplight and raked his eyes over the golden highlights cast upon his jaw as it moved with his smile. Sever enough Meyer Wolfsheim, leant forward in his seat with concern. After his lungs had at last fallen quiet, he began to speak: “I know sound of a dying man. Once, a man called me a Kike and when he pulled a gun on me I had to shoot first. The bullet did slow job- his lung, not his heart, you understand? I had to stand over him ‘til he die, else he could call another man of mine a Kike, you see. You sound a dying man, Mister Carraway. If you cannot tell Gatsby what is wrong at least say you love him before you are dead and can no longer sat anything.”

Beneath the soft cotton of his handkerchief crunched a rosebud, stiff with dried blood. _My thoughts cannot give my friends the complexity they have_. Perhaps Meyer Wolfsheim couldn’t be classed as a ‘friend’, but the point still stood.

“I can’t- he loves her- _her_.”

“Is with you, isn’t he? Do not go on hero worshipping him. Hero worship means you never get what you want- Gatsby learn that with _her_ too.”

Nick shook his head. The action seemed to suck every last reserve of his strength, the lights growing brighter as they took their energy from him and when he blinked and let his eyes shut for too long, for one moment the glass of the Tiffany Lampshades threw colours on the walls he mistook for horrors and nightmares; the babble of a swarming speak easy running through his head in one ear and out the other until he felt small enough he might easily be washed away.

“It will hurt if I tell him. What were you saying about consequence? No.” For the first time he managed to slide his gaze over to meet Meyer Wolfsheim’s eyes behind the lenses. “-I’ve seen what careless people do, especially to Jay- he can’t help caring, as I’m sure you know. And- I _care_. About him. So no, I won’t tell him.”

“You are a fool for love, Mister Nick Carraway.” The tone held equal amounts of disgust and respect, such emotions being caused to well up on his own behalf of his battered heart it was almost a relief that Jay came back to their table when he did. It was an unfortunate necessity that he had to clear his throat and draw two sets of eyes to him instead of being allowed by God or a cruel deputy to slip into the background with a squeeze of Jay's hand. "Nick?" at once he turned to face him. "Nick, are you alright?"

He smiled wanly, a dim bulb barely reaching his cheeks let alone his eyes, "Of course I am, Jay. Me and Mr Wolfsheim have been... just chatting,"

"We've been talking about consequences" _and I feel like a cross-examined suitor and he the father_ Nick added silently on Meyer Wolfsheim's behalf.

"Oh?” polite surprise crossed a new frontier when it appeared on Jay's face- never before had his limitless ability to wonder come across such a challenge to its infinitude. He tried to smile, "I think I can guess who said what."

Nick contributed a solemn nod to the conversation, “I think a lot.” He realised Jay had yet to sit down.

"And Meyer Wolfsheim does not think at all," Jay japed.

Meyer Wolfsheim smiled and laughed- the noise whistled through his teeth, “Ah, but if you always think of the consequences to other people, you’ll never get anything done at all! It is only a matter of which people your consequences effect, or how long for. If more people thought of consequences, why, perhaps we would never be rich or the war would never have happened.”

"Perhaps," Gatsby intoned blankly, cutting the conversation short the same way a mobster sawed off the end of a shotgun. Nick disliked the look that came over Wolfsheim's face coupled with the way Jay was suddenly as painful as a nerve ending beside him, cut down to the quick. He forced himself to think against the scorched pain of his throat and invoked a coughing fit, upon which he hastily excused himself to the rest room- he knew Jay would follow him- in a state if mild panic at how well his deception bloomed as he struggled to breathe for longer than anticipated and kicked the bloody wad of tissues and petals away and wiped his mouth before the door slammed open to herald his lover.

'Old sport? You left rather suddenly are you sure you're alright?"

The smile required no effort to make it look convincing, "I'm fine, Jay. Only- may you take me home? I'm tired, I'm sorry."

Jay's hand danced over his forehead and brushed his hair away, down his cheek and round his ear down his neck to cup him closer as his other hand clutched his own and tethered him to the earth. Surrounded by the hat and coats of bags packed along all four walls on the cloak room hooks, it felt nearly as if he was brave enough to do this in front of other people.

"Of course, old sport. I- I'm sorry. I know I have kept you awake these past few nights."

"Oh, no, it's nothing to do with you at all, although I noticed, because I always notice yo- notice these things. I'm just tired with... everything. Work, you know?"

Watching the man’s smile as like the sun coming out, "Of course I understand, old sport. Get our coats and I'll go say goodbye to Wolfsheim for us and I'll take you home, alright?"

Nick leaned forward and dared to kiss him, hoping he didn’t taste the blood in his mouth and imagining mustard gas covering their entwined hands in the trenches, or the owners of all the coats crowded into the room with their backs to them nonchalant. "Alright, Jay. See you outside."

***

_Oh God_ was Nick's first thought when he awoke and realised it was not yet morning. The screams- which had thoughtfully died down to allow him to regain his comprehension of the conscious world- began again and he felt a chill as Jay turned over in a violent shiver and took the bedsheets with him. "' _Perhaps,_ '" he repeated, realising what given his huge love for the man he probably ought to have realised ten days ago. The war, of course. _Clever Meyer Wolfsheim_.

Reaching out to shake is thrashing lover, his fingers froze mid-air and then changed course, instead stroking up and down his back in long, soft strokes. "Hush, Jay, it's alright. It's not real."

"Jenkins?" the chinks of blue eyes swimming in the darkness were not a part of this reality, unseeing of what was really in front of him. "Forbes? Doc?"

"They’re all safe," agreed Nick in the calmest tone he was able to muster at two in the morning. "Jerry and- and Tom and Dick and Harry. They all came back alive."

"Oh. _Oh._ ” He slumped boneless against Nick’s embrace, eyes closing and voice taking up the challenge as he rattled off the morning's roll call. He did not sound like Gatsby, or Jay; he sounded like Lieutenant James Gatz from North Dakota, volunteering at Camp Taylor for the temptation of bread and board. HIs voice washed over Nick like the sea, trickling down to a river then a stream as he fell back asleep until Nick wasn’t sure he had ever properly woken up.

***

Breakfast was far more awkward than it needed to be. Most of it was simply Nick alone in the kitchen, which shouldn’t have been awkward but somehow was, a feat he suspected was down to an inherent quality within his own nature. When Jay came downstairs and perched himself on the edge of the wooden chair furthest from him, Nick felt the distance all too keenly. "Morning- sleep well?" then internally kicked himself knowing he hadn’t- too obvious a question- he hadn’t mean it to be- stupid thing to say- stupid, Nick, foolish- Goddamnit Nick.

"Old sport," Jay broached the topic and ran the tip of his index finger around the rim of the saucer as Nick prepared the breakfast tings for a meal neither of them would eat; on tenterhooks for the first time he would cough and Jay would banish him to the settee, holding the tea towel ready to catch any more fits of coughing. "You are- I know what you did last night. What you did for _me_ \- no, old sport, don't look at me like that, please. I- you are wonderful, truly, and I-" the words stopped mid-flow. "A wonderful lover."

Was he comparing him to Daisy? Ice ran through his veins and it was a struggle to remember to breathe. _I'm not my cousin!_ He wanted to scream but even if he did have the breath, the words would have stayed silent as a freshly dug grave. He was not Daisy and that was the problem and he had no desire to remind Jay of that fact. The desire to flick a slice of toast in his perfect face was damn near overwhelming. So overwhelming he had to stop what he was doing and hold into the edge of the countertop for support lest he fall over or reveal his trembling fingers. "Thank you" he turned and addressed his shoulder and then turned away again to stare through the net curtains over the window.

"Have I offended you, old sport?" _Oh God please don’t continue that sentence_.

Two nights before, the night before they had gone to dinner with Meyer Wolfsheim, he had sat at his kitchen table all night, rousing only to spit more petals into the sink and wash them down the drain come morning, imagining calling Jordan, unable to ever bring himself to do it. Phones lay down another million miles to reach everyone alive and they lied down them, falsehoods and mistrusts ringing hollowly down the lines like church bells until they forgot the feel of another body under their own. Sitting there all night, shoulders aching under the hem of the work shirt of the day before, he pictured the walk he had taken down Gatsby’s beach the previous evening alone. Thinking about things and looking out across the Sound at the fog horns and the people sailing; ships bobbing to and fro, lit up in dulcet shades of small yellow lights and searching for the green light without thinking to. Wondering if that would become the ice berg the Titanic crashed into when he came home. Jay came to him having already had a bottle of wine and said things about past loves in perfect poetry and then took Nick to bed and whispered filth in his ear.

Nick turned away from the breakfast things and looked directly across the table to meet his eyes, “Of course you haven’t offended me, Jay."


	4. Chapter 4

“I’m going to throw a party tomorrow, old sport.”

Nick’s eyes swam from Gatsby’s feet to his face; his lover had given him a belated birthday gift of a bottle of scarlet cough syrup and it had made his head heavy with blue sky.

“’S the first I’ve heard of this,” Nick mumbled, his mouth forming perfect circles to match the shape of Jay’s cufflinks as he slid and fiddled them through his starched shirt sleeves. Dulcet golden bubbles glimmered into existence and peeled away from the electric lights and his eyes drifted to follow their path instead, low and languid as if he was sinking through the Sound but with none of the inconvenient drowning part. Surprisingly, the cough syrup had somehow worked- he had been doubtful at first, refusing it less out of his anxious need to be polite- as Gatsby took his actions- and more out of disbelief that it would do any good. Flowers were growing in his lungs. _Flowers_. Yet here he was, a shadow fell over him and frowning he looked up then smiled, realising it was Jay. He was beautiful and Nick was by no means objective. Brushed with gold to create the smooth planes of his face; chiselled from the finest marble and sparked into life by a flame of infinite hope bestowed by a god seeking to create a being even greater than holy. Not a wrinkle or crease besmirched his _forget me not blue_ suit, not a fingerprint his solid silver cufflinks or a scuff his shiny, shiny shoes- not that Nick could see his shoes, spread-eagled on the bed of course, but there were some unwavering facts to life and one was that Jay was completely perfect. “Hmm,” he contemplated. “Did I say something?”

Jay’s face broke into an endeared smile. It was a smile that only occurred once in a lifetime and once a man had seen it never wanted to let go. His smile was an extension of all the hopes and miracles he had created to get where he was today a flood of gold from the fountain, promising those who it received that its wearer believed in you just to the extent with which you wanted to be believed in yourself and that you were capable of whatever desire your heart pined for. It was a smile that helped men sleep easy at night. Yet... Nick had never seen this smile before and he had extensively catalogued all the smiles Jay gave.

This time his expression was... softer, as if illuminated on a peaceful yellow evening by the glow of a sunset- the fiercecertainty had dimmed somewhat, to be replaced with an emotion Nick could not name. Only that it was... fond, and the way all young men wanted to be looked at.

As if God had answered all his prayers, Jay leaned down and kissed him. It took an awfully long time for him to pull away and once he did he locked his lips and wrinkled his nose at the taste. “I think that cough syrup’s gone to your head, old sport,” he laughed. Nick could have floated on the sea of his joy forever, rowing on a boat as Jay’s delight took him to places he had hitherto never known existed. “I said: I’m hosting a party tomorrow, old sport. At my house.”

“Okay.” For a few moments there was silence as he wrestled his brain into some form of working order. “For anything in particular?Or anyone? Is the- the- the governor coming again?”

“No, no, it’s just-“ bashfulness was an adorable look on him- “Oh, you’ll think it rather silly.”

“I could never think that.”

“Only... I wanted to try and throw a party not about Daisy.”

It was the first instance since their sexual relationship began that his cousin had been mentioned outright, _No, not the first time-_ pain lanced through his chest. The first time had been- _our first time_. He breathed through the pain and sat up. “I’m glad. I’ll bet you’ll enjoy yourself.”

“Really?”

“Really, really, really. You’ll have fun, having a party without looking at who walks through the door.”

Another laugh, “Alright, old sport. You’ve convinced me- I’ll enjoy myself I’m sure.”

Carefully, mindful of his suit, he kissed nick again. Nick grasped him like a drowning man. When he pulled away, he let his breathe linger over Nick’s lips and when he began to smile, Nick could see the corners of his eyes crinkled like waves thrown up against the side of a boat- even the dinted scare barely half an inch long that hid in the edges of his hairline and was often obscured by his soft blonde hair seemed to glint the colour of a precious metal, promising the worth of the man it uncovered, his hands big and warm and cupping his shoulders- Nick never wanted him to let go.

As if having access to his innermost thoughts and following them to the letter, Jay’s fingers stroked up his shoulder, to the back of his head to kiss him again and then down to curl on his neck and play along his shoulders. _Maybe he’s telling me something in Morse code_ Nick dreamed, giddy with delight. The idea burrowed deep into the embers to spark a wildfire of ideas and he felt his face begin to creak part with the strength of his own smile. That would make a terrific idea for a story.

Jay touched their foreheads together in a display of affection and tried to fix his hair one-handed in the mirror, “What’s that look for, old sport?”

“I had an idea for a story,” he could feel his spine slowly melting the further Jay got from him. “What are you doing today?”

“Well... there’s that meeting with the senator I’ve been invited to attend. After that Meyer wants to meet me ‘for a chat’. Do you think this tie goes with this suit?”

He was nervous again, Nick realised. Worried about the poor boy from Dakota meeting a senator of New York. Instead of completely dismantling his world view, however, he nearly clucked overhow adorably flustered the man got and how marvellously privileged he was to be the only one to see him like this. Forcing his mind away from a wonderful romp in the medicine-coated meadow, he tried terribly hard to say all the right things. “Come here,” he murmured softly, sitting up more and bringing himself ever closer to the face of God. Electric sparks were buzzing beneath his skin the same way telephone pylons and their wires strung across the country and buzzed deep into the night to set the world on edge and began to fix Jay’s collar, deliberately brushing his fingertips over his skin wherever possible, fixing his tie and then stroking his hand down Jay’s cheek. His blue eyes skittered away, ashamed. “You look just fine.”

“You are hardly objective, old sport.”

“Perhaps not, but I know beauty when I see it.”

“I hardly think the senator will want beauty.”

“No, he’ll want you, same as everyone wants. You and that ineffable, gorgeous quality inyou that makes you the best man in the world.Whether you’re James Gatz or Jay Gatsby. If they can’t see past who you were, then tell them to go to hell.”

Failing a verbal response, Jay kissed him. _Was I too obvious?_ But when the kiss ended, Jay’s eyes werewarm. _Say it,_ Nick thought, heart in his mouth. _Say you love me, please._ Pink lips parted- pink the same colour as rose petals- the tongue that had done more profane things to him than he could remember- taken aback expression- as if no one had ever- every man should have sung his praises- “Thank you, old sport. That was- that was- I suppose I had best be going, I don’t want to be late.”

“Alright,” he would have agreed had the pain streaked up his throat and he was lost to a coughing fit again, turning away to press his hanky to his moth before he betrayed himself with blood on his lips or- worse- coughed all in Jay’s face and became the subject of abjectdisgust. “Sorry,” but even that was not quick enough for the short gasps of air he stole for himself. Had he been in a better state, he would have rolled his eyes at how the disease made itself known right after he nearly put his foot in it, and- it was just all rather _dramatic_ , wasn’t it? _I might be a novelist but I would rather not be a metaphor_.

Jay tried to comfort him and the moment was gone. The only mercy donated to Nick Carraway either by God or Dr T J Eckleburg was that he not pressed about seeing a doctor again.

He blinked through his eyelashes and put a paternal hand on Nick’s shoulder, “Perhaps you should get some more sleep, old sport, if you’re not going into the office today.” The hand of God pushed him down onto the bed and he hid his handkerchief underneath his pillow.

“Sorry.”

“Sleep, old sport.”

“Will I see you tonight?”

“Not tonight- I’ve got to prepare for the party- the staff-“

_Tomorrow night_? Wisely, he bit his tongue. No way was Jay choosing him over a party.

“Okay... I’ll see you when I see you.”

A laugh tinkled somewhere above his head; “Sleep well, old sport.”

His last conscious though was _thank God I have the day off_ before he plunged into dreams of the house across the lawn. Then his brain whispered _he’ll win Daisy back_ , but that was part of the nightmare.n

***

There was nothing noble about dying, Nick had come to realise. Perhaps he it was a revelation too late- he _had_ been in the War, after all, where every man bled and screamed for his mother. Yet he had not realised until now, as he sat in an abyss of self-pity on the steps of his veranda watching the house next door. Nothing was romantic about the desperate struggle to breathe and pulling a foreign object from your throat with spittle-coated fingers, adding each day to a mental tally as you waited to start throwing up petals instead of just coughing them. Perhaps he should have brought a wastebasket with him, but if he was mired in painful humiliation already there was no harm in hiding the mett under his hydrangea bushes.

Even by Gatsby’s standards, it was a party to be remembered and even By Nick’s standards, it was a very bad night that causedhim to not go, without the wherewithal to care- however many guests had fit into the house before had doubled, the staff invisible flitters of help and lost in the teem of glitter and best dresses. Up close it would be loud and raucous and hot, he knew that for a fact, yet observing it from afar (the width and breadth of Jay’s lawn allowed it to be classified as great a distance as ‘afar’) the scene was everything Nick had ever wanted to find in New York. As the evening stretched on, time sped up: morals became looser and the crowds drunk more and the dances grew louder, conversations beginning like a deep plunge into the sea with no introductions and women’s hands flapping to jointogether, swearing to never part, falling away only moments later as they turned their attentions to the governortheir husband had just introduced to them. Garish crowds, loosed by time and liquor began to swirl into one another like eddies and up close he knew it would be a terrible cacophony. Band barely audible, music too loud to be heard and people with not one iota of care in their lungs talking and being important. From a distance it looked like a cloud of fireflies, or stars. Little boats rowed too far out onto the black sea, twinkling their little lights and trying to come home.

He hoped he would have the strength to leave before the night was over and the dam began to leak, enable to bear the rubble of the natural disaster of Jay’s house once all the people trodding it underfoot had left. The whitehouse. That whitehouse across the lawn deserved better than the abortive sorrows of men. _Go inside now_ crowed his brain- he was tied and it had been a long day and he wanted nothing else but to go to bed and keep the covers over his head for a long time.

Yet he couldn’t.

Nick was going to be hidden away inside his small, dark house outside of the blinding halo of light whether he was abed or not and here, at least, he could pretend he gave the impression of being another party-goer who had moseyed away, disaffected, from the crowd and now observed at a distance. Home to a deep longing devoid vacant of nearly all other shallow humansthough comprised entirely of human suffering. But he was thirty and too old to lie to himself and call it an honour.

Gatsby had become Nick’s green light, he admitted to himself. Confession was tepid and damp, like an orgasm. Gatsby had become the embodiment of the great faith that life could be better; would improve year by year until one fine morning- he would awake not knowing unhappiness at all. It was an impossible dream. One he had believed in far too long- far longer than any outside observer could have believed possible with such saturnine circumstances pressing against him and yet just as with the green light, some combination of hope and love and desire for connection had blinded him until the realisation was painful, white hot, and inevitable.

Nick Carraway tried to be an honest man. If a man did not know he was loved, did that make his lover a liar? Was omitting the truth that had become the cornerstone of his heart a lie? He had no idea. He had no idea. _Just what I can and can’t live with_. Could he live with the knowledge that the secrets he took to his grave would hurt Jay irreparably? That all the things never said destroyed him?

There was only _one_ thing that remained to be said and he wouldn’t have to live with it at all, so what did it matter? _I love you_ Nick thought of telling Jay. I love you I love you I love you I don’t know how to love you in a way we’ll both and I wish if I ever tell you it would sound how it does in my head. Nick was alone on his veranda with a mess of his own blood for company and Jay probably wasn’t even aware he hadn’t turned up. At least it saved him the trouble of coming upwith a better excuse than _I wasn’t invited._

***

When he woke up the next day, pale grey light he presumed to be morning hung in the air through the curtains and he became acutely aware that he felt hungover and there was only a slim chance the bed he was in as in fact his own. At no point in the evening did he remember _going_ to bed, or drinking, or bumping into the man behind the voice murmuring every so often down the hall was he talking to another- no, the hone- the phone was down the hall- the sofa, then. He was on the sofa. _That explains the crick in my neck, I suppose_. The question, really ought to perhaps to be _why is Jay in my house?_ Except it was Jay and it wasn’t a question he needed an answer to so long as the result remained the same.

Nick sank back intothe cushions, squirming his toes in delight to find he was covered in a soft blanket and let his eyes tumble closed. Floating upon squishy, over-stuffed cushions was more comfortable than he could have expected- how would you go about it, old sport- the spring had gone in the middle and created a puddle of warmth specifically for him- not at _all!_ \- the air was not yet hot enough it felt smothering to breath in- okay. Okay okayokay- how was the party last night- yes, old sport, yes that’s it! Another party, of course!- Another party? - When?- no, you’re right, Meyer, ofcourse, this time I’ll be sure to woo- woo who? Not me. All happiness evaporated like a flashflood and he felt the flowers and thorns grasp his lungs tighter. Or perhaps that was just the normal procedure of coughing and he was just being dramatic- Hanahaki was a very dramatic disease, cropping up conveniently at every mention of Jay. The sofa smelled of his dog still, before it had run away or the Finn sent it packing, and he hadn’t thought of getting a new dog because Nick was going to be dead soon.

With mounting horror, he realised that was no handkerchief in his pockets and he didn't what happened to the waste basket that had have been full of petals and Jay had stopped talking in the other room. When he tried to get off the sofa his legs got tangled in the blanket and he nearly fell down and almost didn't make it. Either the kindest, most merciful God or the cruellest, harshest allowed him to snap through the door into the hallway just as the rustling behind him heralded Jay whipping into the sitting room. It felt like the strangest, most bizarre parody of a child’s race he had ever experienced and he would have laughed if his lungs were not currently occupied with coughing. Slamming into the bathroom, a memory of him the night previous slammed into his brain and he saw the waste basket full of petals under the sink. Yes, he had grown inexplicably furious and stormed upstairs to be, only to miss having someone asleep on the other side so much he retreated and pressed himself into the back of the divan until the grooves imprinted red marks on his face.

“Shit,” Nick muttered as the stain on his shirt’s inner elbow became apparent. “Shit” because Jay was coming up the stairs and he hadn’t locked the door and-

At the exact same instance as his lover stepped over the threshold to the bedroom, Nick swung the bathroom door open and greeted him with a tired but cleansmile. “Hello, how was the party?”

Jay stopped short in his tracks, eyes dancing in fear, completely at odds with his freshly-pressed suit that smelt of pure, spotless linen and _that_ at odds with the mediocrity of the Sunday beginning to unfold itself outside, creating a luminal space at the epicentre to fit the man’s perfection. He took Nick’s breathe away... he thought back s mile, but that _was_ pretty funny.

“Party?” Jay startled, looking around with an expression not dissimilar to a startled cat. He let the smile crack his face. “I thought- I heard- are you alright, old sport?”

Tentatively walking under water, Jay took him in his arms. Nick thought of the shirt hidden deep within th laundry basket and the paper tissues and pot-pourri ‘accidentally’ spilled into the trash can to cover them and how he had nearly gagged first withthe strength of coughing and then the feeling of the roses at the back of his throat. He had made himself swallow them back down because he knew if he retched he would not be able to stop. He smiled wider and slid his arms around jay’s waist, careful not the crease the fabric. “Of course,” he smiled. .”Was that Meyer Wolfsheim on the phone earlier?”

“Hmm? Oh- yes, I hope you don’t mind me using your phone, old sport. But I had to speak to him on a matter of the utmost-“

“Jay,” he cut him off with a kiss. “You’re rambling. Of course I don’t mind.”

The smile was in his voice and it sentwarmth into every inch of his body. It felt like coming home. Jay tucked his chin on top of his shoulder and they began to sway and hum softly, as if to music only Jay could hear, ghostly strains all the way from his house where the band had stopped playing hours before. “I’m throwing another party next Saturday, old sport. Tell me you’ll come, won’t you?”

There was nothing Nick wanted less in the world than to attend and become yet again just theredundanteyewitnessJay Gatsby’s affections, yet found himself agreeing to attend anyway because it was impossible to say no when Jay was kissing his neck like that. “Alright, alright,” giddy with happiness, he felt Jay’s hands start to creep under the hem of his shirt. “I’ll _come.”_

The innuendo (which was a very good one, given that it was Nick making it) was lost in the airless atmosphere around Jay’s head and instead he took the agreementwith guileless joy. “Excellent, old sport! I was worried you wouldn’t, when I saw you didn’t come last night. All night I kept thinking I should come and check on you.”

“How could you have left your gues- oh. You were- I didn’t think you would notice I was missing, honestly.” He hastily bit down on his tongue before he could say anything else so stupid. Stupid along the lines of _I’m glad I’m so important to you_ or _I didn’t realise the party was so important to you_. It was his first party without Daisy, of course it was going to be important. So… why would he have wanted Nick to be there? Suspicions began to form in his mind onincoming thunderclouds about the revelryhe had viewed from afar- he must have met- there must have been someone last night that he had met, introduced by one flowering guest or another. Now he wanted to woo them with the next party and Jay- kind, sweet, oblivious Jay who could cut a deal with a mobster but couldn’t use the right fork- would like Nick to meet him. What had he ever done that God had to punish him by making him love such a difficult, lovely man?

“But of course I would!” he gave him a look of such crestfallen consternation it hurt to look at him and it hurt to look away from him. It didn’t stop hurting until they were back to the embrace with their arms round each other’s shoulders.

“Sorry. I would have come if I had known you- I’m sorry, Jay, I was just tired. I might as well have come anyway, because it was impossible to get to sleep.” If questions after his wellbeing were anticipated after that comment, they were unavoidable as he coughed before he had properly finished his sentence. Fearshot through him at the thought of petals and all potentials of this situation to go south, but lucky for him the rosebuds stayed at the back of his throat and he swallowed a she best he could with a wince.

Questions and barrages of demands didn’t come; for a fleeting moment he was disappointed and confused as to how he could so boldly presume Jay would ask after his health and then he was coughed and carried along in a pale pink cloud of what could only be described as _fussing_ , hands flapping about him in every direction with the occasional interjection of a voice saying the word ‘doctor’ and he refuting any medical man of any sort. Together they made a strange three-legged race as Jay’s momentum sweptthem back into the bathroom.

“Is this _really_ necessary?” Nick tried to press a delicate argument and was overruled by the scratchiness of his throat that surrendered his words to the air. Really, being sat on the edge of the bath as Jay tried to spoon cough syrup into his mouth himself was a step too far.

“You have to take your medicine to get belter, old sport,” he insisted, face brightwith worry and syrup spoon hovering at eye level waiting for the first opportunity. The instant he opened his mouth to protest being treated akin to a sore toddler the spoon was inserted into his mouth instead and Nick closed his mouth un defeat, glaring up at Jay when he didn’t mover. Jay- the bastard- merely raised his eyebrows at him, “Now swallow.”

Remembering the _last_ time he’d said that made him blush and ruined the effect of his scorn as he surrendered and swallowed the thick, butter liquid. “I don’t like the tatse- or how it makes me feel. Like I’m hallucinating.”

Answer, when it come, was casual as his lover pottered about the bathroom- thank good ness his Finn had taken the thermometer as a self-gifted retirement present else he’d bethe would have tried to stick that in his mouth too and Nick would not be responsible for his actions. “That’ll be the cocaine, old sport.”

“Co- what- _Jay_! Is that even legal anymore?”

“If it works then it works.”

“Jay!”

“Nick” he parroted, and then leaded down to peck a kiss upon his forehead. “God, you’re adorable when you’re flustered. Come on, I’ll make breakfast.”

***

Nick made breakfast. Jay could not cook to save his life- even the broad nuance between toasted bread and burned bread was completely inaccessible for him and Dan Cody both- and Nick had no desire to have his stove ruined so chased him out of the kitchen with thespatula, laughing as much as his lungs would allow. _I’m going to miss this_ he thought, catching his breath before he had to plate up the eggs. Before all this he had never truly appreciated how much he needed to breathe and taken for granted being able to climb the stairs without pausing for air. Had it not been for thecoughing and flowers and petals, he could have nearly let himself believe they were simply symptoms of his dizzying new affair who heights only ever were on the increase, until he couldn’t remember the feel of the ground beneath his feet. It could have been romantic so easily and it could not. There was nothing romantic about dying. It was just a man’s soul slowly dissolving into the sea of time.

Just when his chest was tightening in a way that had nothing to do with the Hanahaki disease, a strong pair of arms slipped round his waist and a soft, affectionate mouthpressed kisses all along theback of his neck.

“Stop it, Jay, that tickles! Oh- my- stop it, I’ll drop the eggs!”

“Sorry, old sport but you look good enough to ravish.”

“As do you, but- the food will go cold.”

“Alright, alright. But…” Breathe whistled along the whorls of his ear and he shivered right down to his toes, “Just you wait until after breakfast.”

“After breakfast you’ll be doing the dishes. No- no- not _there_ , it ti- stop it!”

“Stop what, old sport?”

“ _That!_ ”

Breakfast was served with a side of soft snickers the same yellow as the egg yolks and sly, coy looks over the top of the butter dish. Talked turned to a safer topic- Gatsby’s new party, his parties in general and lastnight’s guest: Jordan Baker.

“Miss Baker asked after you, you know,” explained Jayas he sipped his Earl grey. “Said she couldn’t remember one of my parties you hadn't been to.”

Nick was forcing himself awake with coffee and so it took a moment for him to reply. “That’s a lie; you threw lots of parties before you met me.”

“That’s true.” The newspaper rustled and sunlight brushed tenderly over the walls and illuminated everything in golden strokes of ember colours. He had witnessed Jay dishevelled and debauched many times, reading an un-ironed newspaper and wearing the clothes from the night before at his breakfast table, yet he only grey more and more beautiful every time.

For the umpteenth time that morning: he coughed. Swearing into his handkerchief, the newspaper rustled louder. “Really old sport, I wish you would let me send my physician over- sometimes at night I can even hear you wheezing.”

“It’s only a cold, Jay,” the smile felt as bland as his toast tasted in his mouth. “Don’t worry, I promise I’ll be well enough to come to your party.”

Some hums, ‘hmph’s, looks of exasperation or concern or boredom before the conversation righted itself again. Jay’s gaze softened, “I remember we met at one of my parties. You didn’t know who I was.”

“No, I didn’t have the faintest idea. Then you told me your name.”

“Yes… safe to say I’ll never forget it, old sport. You really are memorable yourself, never mind the party. But _that_ party was for- for a dream already long gone and I just didn’t know it. This party on the second, it’s for Labour Day.”

“People will come- more guests than all the others, you know, being the end of summer and all. They’ll all have to be off their vacations and in their offices next week.”

“The staff are already prepared for a big night. However, I- I’ve been meaning to ask you something, old sport, because I know you like to write, and- oh, no, I’m not offering you to go and work for one of Wolfsheim’s lot again, never fear, old sport! Only I read some of your work this morning,waiting for Meyer to pick up- not intentionally, you understand, it was merely next to your address book, and it’s _really_ good, old sport. I was wondering if perhaps you wouldn’t mind penning the story of how we met some time, so I don’t have to worry about forgetting?”

“Of course I would, Jay. But on one condition.”

“…Go on, old sport.”

“You tell me what is _really_ bothering you.”

“How did you- no, no, silly question, old sport, of course you knew. Honestly, it’s not much really, I should be getting on-“

“Just tell me, Jay. Is it about your party?”

“No. Yes. No. I- it’s for Labour Day, obviously and I just can’t help but think I should cancel the whole thing.”

“But why?”

“…Am I really- I mean, have I achieved… what I am trying to say old sport is-”

“You made your wealth bootlegging and it feels cheap?”

“Yes.”

“Look, I can guarantee you two things. One: all those at your party made their wealth by bootlegging as well, or by an accident of birth and they could just as easily have been born poor so you’ve got nothing to be guilty of. Secondly: all the rumours they believe about how you got rich are far worse than bootlegging and yet they still attended. I think that says more about them than you.”

“Logically I know you’re right, old sport. Yet… there’s just always this little voice in my head that says I’m not so great, no matter what I’ll ever do.”

“Tell the voice in your head that it can go to hell, too. You’re great in my book.”

***

In my younger and more vulnerable years my relatives became aware of a certain failing of mine- no, not the predilection towards being queer, though this revelation could not have happened without them having to confront th secret they had known since I was fourteen- but a perceived sort of naivety within me, that led me to be a fool in love. Not that my great aunt spat it at me in such gentle terms, but the crux of the matter remains the same. Despite this rather unrequited affection for a college classmate that was the catalyst for this, I am ashamed to say that that was not the last time I made a fool of myself, desperately deluding myself that a man loved me in return. That would not happen until well past my thirtieth birthday, when I received the greatest gift of the godsand the worst blow imaginable not only on the same day but even at the same time. Looking back, that must be when the Hanahaki Disease first- and- and I- and- no, no, this is all WRONG

***

Aunt Eliza was correct when she said I did not know what men could do to each other. In my defence; I did not know that could come to encompass a Great War, or Michael the college quarterback (we treated one another horribly) or Hanahaki Disease. No doubt if I wrote to my Aunt and told her of this malady, she would scoff and call it a young man’s disease. Perhaps it is, but by God I do not feel young- I feel constantly as if a weight even heavier than the gaze of Dr T J Eckleburg is pressing down on me at all times. I am contemplating sleeping pills again because the damned coughing keeps me up at all hours. Every task and action and journey I have to set aside a half hour extra to what I did before, because it make take me longer to achieve or I’ll go into a fit of coughing once I do. Jay is worried. He is worried and yet not worried enough to love me back and I’m DYING over him. I don’t want to talk about this. I haven’t even written about when we first met together or first slept together. Shan’t. Pull yourself together, Nick. 

***

Even though meeting Gatsby was a spectacular moment- it could be little else, given the greatness of the man- it was not the turning point of my life. No, that happened later on when, in the wake of his dreams shattered to dust, he kissed me back and took refuge in my arms. Broken he might have been. But what we have was built from the very bones and we made it tangible in our hands. Yet however important our meeting may or may not have been, it is still necessary to record, for it set the precipice for our entire relationship thereafter; even before we had become completely _involved_.

A tray of cocktails floated through the air towards me and as if by the magic of the evening I took one smoothly and with effortless polite practise and sipped, too polite not to drink in a crowd that was. The further the earth lurched away from the sun, the bluer the night grey and the more the nights shone until the whole house had the same feel to it as the illuminated adverts or rides of Coney Island. A queer look breezed over the face of the man I had just met and enquired about the host, looking up- for we were on a slope and he for once shorter than I- into my eyes with an inquisitive, tender curiosity. As if he had never seen such a phenomenon before and wanted to again. Silence tried to get a foot in the door and I inevitable felt a horrible dismay that I had embarrassed myself in an ignorant way I’d never recover from. Then, he breathed in and swept back, steady on his feet in a way that was an extension of his gorgeous personality, the world settling into place again with the golden dreams he exhaled into the world with every breath.

“I’m afraid I haven’t been a very good host, old sport,” he smiled. His smile was one in a lifetime- it believed in you just so much as you wanted to be believed in, assured you had an intimate worthiness of your being at odds with any other thought anyone had ever had about you; affirmed the fact he was your company and he was smiling at _me_. “You see, I am Gatsby.” The fireworks went off behind him at the exact moment he raised his glass to me in a toast. I could only stare. I was lost in a whole new universe of awe and although I did not yet know it, my heart was at that very moment swept away on the tides of a sea change. My life would never be the same again and neither would my affections, for they were all for Gatsby. His smile proved he was the sun and the world- the universe- life itself moved around Him. That smile, as though there was no other mere mortal this god of a man he would rather see, even gaping gormless at him with my mouth hanging open as I was. I was no better than Daisy- I was in love.

Perhaps after the extraordinary revelation that was the start of our acquaintance, one could be forgiven for assuming that seeing him strapped bare of all affectations, life falling apart in his grasp and only able to stare blankly, would break the spell I had fallen under. It was not so- the opposite, in fact. To see the tiny Pandora’s flame that had been stoked into such a wildfire of boundless proportions, an immeasurable and limitless capacity for dreams and wonder that was begot of the man’s own charm and desperate desire to _live_. I only loved him more. Painful, I admit, it was painful to see him in such a state and for many hours that night that I thought would never end, Jay- for he was Jay, now, not Gatsby- gazed out of his bedroom window at the green light. No longer an enchanted object but rather the eulogy of his dreams, still alive but changed irrevocably and never again to be the burning candles of first love. And I, looking at Jay who did not so much as look at me, would have never thought with the pain I was in that I would live to see morning.

The he kissed me and he wanted me and life has never been the same since. After our first time in bed together we slept crushed in his satin sheets until evening broke out over the tops of the clouds, casting pink and yellow shadows through the bay windows. Upon waking he was shy, courteous and soft-spoken and I found him so charming and was so endeared that in a clumsy bid of comfort I told him I loved him and just when I thought I had pulled the thunderclouds back over the city, he told me he loved me too. No attempt of my limited pen could describe the scene in justice and so I shall not attempt to do so here, but the entirety of that evening is burned upon my memory forever. Even should I die or lose all senses in a dreadful accident, the love I feel goes deeper. It is an intrinsic part of me and could no more be erased than my own soul.

Jay loves me too.

Things were perfect after that. We worked our respective jobs and devoted out weekends and truant days entirely to one another exploring New York and all within it with new eyes, ready to appreciate what God had laid out before us in strings of fairy lights. Though not as frequent or as gaudy as before, the parties began again and I made it up with Jordan and even Daisy, feeling with conviction that life was starting all over again in the Fall as the summer leaves rusted into an early applause. Slight grievances arose here and there- bootlegging is a busy business and Jay sometimes could not get away, and as the air turned colder I developed a cold that made me good for nothing but lying under the bed clothes for two days. Yet no true reality stuck to the sun-soaked hue that had fallen over our lives and we came out the other side in a state of marvellous health and mind with two weeks of autumn to spare, seizing the last of the sun with a delight that was for once not a swan-song, but a prelude.

It will soon be Christmas. Jay still loves me back.

***

The party that night was packed as ever Jay’s parties had been and for once the man seemed to be enjoying his own party, which was worth all the effort it had taken Nick to get out of bed that morning. He was great again, great as ever, bounding up and down marble staircases in a way that was brimming over with his desire for life. It was plain to see how much the crowds invigorated him, as if he gained more and more momentum as the night grew on and burned with the same power as the electric lights and chandeliers that began to grow in intensity.

Nick’s head was swimming. Cocktails floated past under strings of lights; music of the full brass band too loud for him to register in his hearing and he touched not a drop of alcohol at all, yet was still drunk on the sight of Jay. When the clock struck midnight the crowd were shouted into forming some semblance of a tide around the balconies and lawns and Jay turned- the men and women parted one either side of him a new Moses- in the middle of the crowd, raising his glass at the exact moment that fireworks erupted on the shores of the Sound behind him. Nick smiled and waved back, ducking his head shyly before at the first opportunity dropping the red-stained petals to be trodden beyond recognition underfoot.

Everything was so spectacular that Nick began to feel on edge, sick with anticipation over when the whole thing would slide into being a spectacle. Being sober did not help- he was still plagued with the same fears as he was drunk, fears of Jordan or someone else he knew appearing in his path and he being unable to avoid conversation with friends. Dizzying heights that would immediately lead to a fall, yet he did not want it to come anymore than he could stop the night climbing higher and higher. Jay’s failure would be no different than the downfall of an angel.

At once he was within and without; simultaneously unwilling to leave Jay’s side and afraid of being too characterless or clingy if he did not, which he’d have been more embarrassed about if his attempt to find a dark room to recoil at himself within were not cut short when he found his lover in one such room. On first glance his breath arrested in his ribcage, convinced he was looking at the bare figure of the green light in his pale suit. But on closer inspection as the light-headedness nearly toppled him forward he was just half-dozing, forehead against the cool glass, and the green light was fading too, merely the phosphor of the last firework which exploded several hundred of feet in the sky.

“Jay?” nick made sure the door was completely closed behind him and hurried over to his side, feeling as if he were gliding on the thick carpet despite the clunky, leaden lurch of his feet. For some unbeknownst reason he kept seeing Jordan walk around the marble columns into view: a cool Spectre of imagination, her slim carriage hugged and shapeless in a gold dress that was also a dark dress, gaze seeing right through him as a hand went through a pane of glass. “Are you alright?”

Wakefulness set upon him with a start, or maybe he had never been asleep at all, just tired of the waking world. “Oh- w- of course, old sport, I’m just...” he dishevelled his perfect hair with one hand and his eyes searched the crowds below in his blue gardens and laughed. “I’m afraid after all this I am rather tire, old sport. Would you believe it?”

“Yes.” It was the truth, even if it was for different reasons. That much, at least, connected them. Nick could feel the pool of warmth slowly spreading out from where their shoulders touched over the rest of his body, soothing even if briefly the woes of his painful chest and his riotous heart. Music began to start up from somewhere or perhaps had always been playing and had only now permeated the room they were occupying- one of the guest bedrooms, he deduced, recognising landmarks from the many explorations they had taken of Jay’s house together. One of the many that had never been used and the idea shot a bolt of pain through him in the form of loneliness, aided by the notes of the song chiming against the huge amount of air trapped between the four walls of the room. The ceiling was high. So high he might have become lost trying to see it, but that was what Jay did: grounded him. Both of them were holding onto one another because they were the only thing in the room there to hold on to and their swaying became rhythmic out of pure accident and human nature when confronted with a melody. Born of some bone deep exhaustion they were utterly isolated within, even from each other. Either Nick reached out first or Jay did, then their hands were together, then their others hands, then their chests, then their shoulders, then their space and they were swaying in a circle no more than three feet wide in diameter in rough time to the music. A dance. They were dancing. It was in no way even approximate to any time he may have written about such an occasion in his tepid, never-to-be finished novels and it wasn’t even that this was because it was better because they were both undoubtedly real. Nor any other silly though or romance that wormed its way into his mind. Rather, he and Jay were far too tired to do anything except be close to each other for a long time. And it wasn’t marvellous but it was still nice.

***

When the music stopped- or when they simply realised they had fallen asleep standing up- a glance over to the window showed the party was over.

“I’m sorry I made you miss it, old sport,” commiserated Jay with a friendly clap on his shoulder and trying to blink back to the world enough to leave the room.

“There’s no place I’d rather be than with you.” Nick replied, completely honestly. He came back to himself seemingly quicker than what Jay did, which may’ve had something to do with the precipice he wavered on again, waiting for his breath to catch in his chest on the tail-end of an inhale. He had to breathe in _a lot_ , being alive and all.

Looking away, Jay coughed and straightened his tie though didn't bother to fix his hair before leading them out into the sprawl of the rest of the house the staff had already set upon the disarray left behind, as wasps to a rotten fruit, and would continue to do so until the job was done. He and Jay wondered all over the mansion with an idleness that by contrast felt almost shameful, offset only because they were both far too tired to give a damn. Nick longed to be privy to horrific sorrows and intimate revelations that were bothering his lover, yet also to beset with the anxiety and rudeness of asking to ask. There’d been no awkward introductions to the modern young socialite that must have caught Jay’s eyes as he’d feared would be the case and so he could only presume that the affair was in the very early stages- the beginnings of a forest fire, no more than smouldering as they exchanged longing looks over crowded rooms and both tried and tried not to have any excuse to talk to one another in the hopes of drawing out he dance a little longer.

How many more parties, then, until they met and began a fire that could not be put out? Would he be dead before then and avoid getting burned? Why was he still here, arm looped through Jay’s, if he was going to be burned in the end?

Nick would take what he could get.

Holding back laughter and biting back a smile, he let himself drift as Jay began to explain the details of some historical anecdote in a low, thrilling voice. Creating a sea on which to float as they moved on their tired legs all over his house. A time back when he was as Oxford, after the war; he supposed that was the glorious utopia his youth. A time of education and achievement and back-pay, for away from fighting and still believing Daisy was waiting for him whilst she lay a comfortable ocean away, so far apart they didn't even share any waking house and yet still there, ready to return to when the time came. An exotic American soldier in full body and health, flirting devilishly with men and women, pressing forward into life with the momentum of complete, exhilarating, we-survived-a-war relief. Hints of that yellow peace came though, even after half a decade of simmering trying to be forgotten. It settled over their hearts, beating like the flap of a baby bird’s wings and allowing them to gradually slow down into the constant silent humming of being alive. If he was ever asked to repeat what Jay spoke of that night it would be an impossible feat, for he was entirely content to linger in the pink sea his smooth voice flowed into- Jay’s hand moved from his arm, to his shoulder, to his waist, hair getting more and more gold as the new morning grew. Nick would swear he had never been as happy as he had in that time, sinking lower and lower into the ink sea and listening to Jay’s voice, heart slowing its racing with every fathom he descended.

He hit the sea bed.

And coughed.And kept coughing. The night shattered apart like glass, “Old sport?” Jay turning to him, eyes wild with concern as his arm was torn away from Nick’s waist- kept coughing- every cough ripped deeper and deeper into his chest and grasped hold of him more firmly- long black claws tearing apart his lungs piecemeal- he couldn’t breathe I can’t breathe. He coughed and coughed, no longer standing upright, love suffocating the entirety of his throat and tasting like bile. As if at a great distance away from his on body, he came aware of a red-hot hand guiding him by the elbow to sit on one of the pink love-seats. Sitting down didn't help. The world lurched further and further away from him, mustard yellow fog beginning to pout in front of his eyes, billowing in thick tendrils over the expensive furniture with more gentleness than they ever gave a man. The moon loomed in his peripheral vision, hovering along parallel to the ground at his cornices, then he realised it was Jay’s face and the world bounced back into life around him when he spoke.

“Nick? Nick, old sport, are you alright?” The world went white and his hand was on Nick’s back and Nick couldn’t response, he was coughing too hard. _I’m going to die here_ in Jay’s house, in a room that wasn’t used before and never would be again, a haunted room. He would die here and haunt this room and Jay would go find his new lover and explore every room in the house except for this one. He was still coughing. Tear were springing to his eyes and dribbling down his cheeks as he strained to _get it out_ ; coughing so violently he banged the back of his head against a surface that might have been Jay’s collar bone.

“I’ll get you dome water, old sport,” Jay decided and stood and Nick coughed a full rose into the palm of his hand, blood spattering out onto the carpet in a crime scene.

Not even the clock ticked as they both stared in horror at the bloody blossom. The spell broke as Nick clenched it in his fist and with a ragged, wheezing exhale looked up to meet Jay’s eyes, fear flooding into the newly-opened spaces of his chest. “I can explain,” he croaked out in a hurry. “Honestly, Jay, I can explain all that’s happening-“

-“It’s been happening to you too, old sport?”

He was too shocked to try and decipher the look crossing his face. “You can’t be serious.”

Jay nodded. “To be honest with you, old sport, I thought I had finally gone mad. These past few days I’d been having a bit of trouble breathing- thought I had caught our cold. Then this morning before you came over, I coughed up- well, see for yourself.”

Like a magician’s trick, he drew a red carnation petal from his pocket and held it up for Nick to see. Red carnations were Nick’s favourite, but he did not dare to hope. “Oh.”

“’Oh’?” he looked back up at Jay, standing tall like the Statue of Liberty. “That’s all you can say, ‘oh’? I think- and my apologies if this sounds blunt old sport, but- you need to say something more than just ‘oh’.”

“I- yes. You’re right. I called. Do you know anything, abut, what’s happening?”

“Not a thing.”

“Right- well- I called Jordan, she’s- she’s a smart woman. This _thing_... it’s called Hanahaki Disease. Flowers are growing in our lungs- it’s very rare, obviously. Flowers are growing in our lungs because whoever we love doesn’t love us back.”

“Surely though, if it’s a disease it must have a cure?”

“You have to tell them you love them. And they have to love you back, else the flowers grow until you suffocate and die. And you’ll never love me back, so...” Nick trailed off and shrugged helplessly.

Like lightning, Jay’s gaze snapped to fix upon him and pin him down, “What was that?”

He flushed, realising what he had said. “I- nothing.”

“No. _No_. You love me?” confusion was writ into every line of his face.

“What- _of course_ I do. Jay. Christ- why do you think I’ve been sleeping with you all these months?”

“I- you- - you slept with that McKee fellow!”

“Mr McKee-“ somehow at some point they had gotten very close to one another’s faces- “was _nothing_ like you. You’re just... I love you. I can’t tell you all the thoughts I have in my head, but I love you with all of them.”

“Oh.” Jay said. “ _Oh._ ”

He did not look angry at the confession, but did not look like he returned the feeling either. “I’m sorry, I’ll go-“ Jay’s hand caught his wrist and stopped him. Confusion was still the dominant emotion on his face, but realisation was dawning as the sun dropped over his eyes.

“Why of course,” he murmured, hardly loud enough to hear and eyes far away. “Of course- of course it’s- I threw this party for you, Nick, didn't I? But, no- of course you didn't know, because I didn't either, but it’s been four months since the anniversary of our first meeting and I threw a party for you- God, I’ve been such a blind fool. Of course.”

“Do you mean-“

“I mean-“ the breath of each word hit his face, as if he wanted to say it right into Nick’s mouth. “I love you too. I never realised before- all those times I told Meyer Wolfsheim all about you- I never knew... not before tonight- what I feel for you is nothing at all like what I felt for Daisy so I thought... But of course it couldn’t feel the same, old sport, don’t you see? With Daisy I was chasing after someone who wasn’t the same anymore because I was trying to repeat the past. And you...”

Nick’s chest felt light and heavy all at once, “I what?”

Jay moved closer. “You kiss me like I’m worth kissing.”

Nick moved even closer, “And you’ve spent all this time in love with me and you had no idea?”

“None at all!”

“You oblivious bastard,” Nick said, and kissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternative ending: 
> 
> The next pink roses Nick sees are the ones he gives Jay, inviting him out ont heir first official ‘date’. Jay agrees, smile full some something even more than gold.
> 
> (YOu just KNOW they're going to get a joint xmas present from JOrdan and Daisy ;))


End file.
